David Leong

Protect your e-mail account from SPAMMERS

I have come across a lot of internet users who publish their e-mail accounts on their blogs or websites in the form of user [at] webmailcompany [dot] com. From my personal experience, 1 out of 3 personal blogs that I’ve come across use this method in the hope of avoiding robots that crawl for e-mail addresses. I highly doubt the effectiveness of such method. By googling *[at] gmail [dot] com, I managed to obtain 12 million e-mail accounts in 0.16seconds (The asterisk represents a wildcard character that accepts zero or more characters in replace of it)

Imagine what a professional spammer can do with 12 million gmail e-mail accounts! And bear in mind that we’re only talking about e-mail accounts that belongs to gmail. A simply Ruby or Perl script can extract all the information that google has indexed and replace every [at] with @ and [dot] with a period. A spammer would definitely be satisfied with this huge collection of e-mail addresses that Google has indexed and can now concentrate more on his malicious spamming activities.

Note that this also applies to *@gmail.com queries on Google. In fact, Google managed to return 99 million hits for this query.

A better way to protect yourself is to hand write your e-mail address and then embed it in an image file. At this time, most computers are not very smart in reading hand written images yet. Take this image and place it as a link on your website/blog so that users will need to physically click on it to view your e-mail address.

I used Windows paint to create this.

clickhere@gmail.com