Obfuscate Your Email to Stop Spam

To "obfuscate" something means to make it non-obvious or hidden. So why would you want to hide your email address, and how can it help stop spam mail?

A general prerequisite to receiving spam is that spammers need to obtain your email address. This commonly occurs a few different ways.

Once your email address is "in the system" - there's not too much you can do to prevent the spam from being sent. You'll have to cope with the problem on the receiving end. This means filtering - whether it be using server-side or client-side software to filter spam.

If the "name" portion of your email is just your first name, there's a good chance you'll end up on spam lists one way or another. Spammers try sending messages to common names even if they don't have solid evidence that they are valid addresses.

For example, joe@spambutcher.com, jack@spambutcher.com and carol@spambutcher.com are good candidates to get spam even if they were never published to a website. Since their addresses now appear on this page, junk messages will almost certainly be directed towards those accounts. Good thing they don't in reality exist.

Besides that, there are two main other ways email addresses become "compromised."

When an account is published publicly - such as to a webpage, blog or the Usenet - it can be crawled by spambots. A spambot is much like a search engine's webcrawler, except that it's specifically collecting email addresses. A good way to deal with spambots is to obfuscate your email address when publishing it publicly.

Recently, SpamButcher released the SpamFreeze utility. SpamFreeze is an email obfuscator including a "Turing test" to provide extra security. SpamFreeze is entirely free to use.

Another common scenario is that an account is given to a trusted third-party, who turns out not to be trust-worthy. These can include online retailers, job fair organizers or anyone else who wants your email.

If you own your own domain, many ISP's support using "wildcard" email addresses. This way you could fill out the job fair application with "seattlejobfair@domain.com" and purchase items from Tim's Hobbies using "timshobbies@domain.com". If one of those organizations sells your address out to a spammer, you know who's responsible. You can then simply disable that alias, and stop doing business with that company if you so choose.

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