How to control spam

At my work, when they list on the web pages all of the employee's e-mail addresses. They use another symbol such as

John.Doe-a-business.com
Jane.Doe-a-business.com

please change all -a- to @

They claim that this prevents spam search spiders from compiling lists of e-mail addresses. Does this work? Second, what about lists of e-mail addresses sent through e-mail. Can they be searched as well by these spiders? I don't even know if spider is the correct term. Thanks for any advice.

Some spam spiders can even read text in images. They are pretty intelligent these days and I guess they could translate your example pretty easily. So having an image doesn't really work. If you want it to be 100% spam free, then don't post it. On a site I did, my solution was to have a contact form, you still get robots that fill in the forms and submit it, but if you really want to avoid this you can do some type of image verification for the submit form too.

Funny I get very little spam, both in my mail.com and my hotmail.com address.

inspite of the the fact I post my hotmail account to various BB I never get much junk mail, on the other hand the junk mail filter on hotmail seems to work pretty good.

i am getting over thirty posts a day in my work account...all from replica watch companies. I only use my work account for work and anything else I use a gmx account for. And the GMX account is over one hundred a day.

I have already mentioned on TT about 5 times how I avoid spam, and that I dont get any. But theres no reason to get spam anymore. I guess those who get it deserve it.

I don't use my GMX account any more for precisely that reason. The spam filter is completely crap.

Edit: or perhaps I've not configured it correctly yet. Let's be honest here

Maybe I don't use the search function that well, but looking up spam on TT, I could not find any good recommendations. I went through your 103 pages and searched for spam and only had three "hits". One saying GMX was great. One saying that you switched to Gmail and have hardly any spam and the last refering to how much spam you would get in my space compared to the other one where you receive a portuguese spam.

But my question concerning spam is only if there are spiders reading emails that you send, not just web pages?

I use a program called Qurb which works perfect. It works with Outlook or Outlook express and is by far the best filter prog I've ever seen. http://www.qurb.com/

@Brokenm Yeah wasnt suggesting anyone should actually search for what I wrote, just giving an excuse to justify my laziness in not typing it out again.

You get better info doing a regular web search anyway. Theres heaps of info and effective solutions out there that really have made spam a thing of the past.

Something like that, yeah. Or a server's been cracked somewhere. I have my own domain so I make up new addresses sometimes, and have some that I've just put in the TO line of one email ever, just because I put all my recipients in the BCC line so that they don't all get each other's email addresses. Now I get spam at those made-up addresses. One was "wedding_guests@mydomain.com" -- only used once in a mail I sent 2.5 years ago, now I get two spams a day to it.

i guess you could just have a dubious relay that stores emails addresses from the header.

There is a problem with BCCing however, and that's that many other's email programs often think your mail is spam because the recipient's email address isn't there.

What program does that, Showem? All the ones I know let you set up your filters however you want. I certainly hope any programs with that problem change, because many mailing lists put your name into a generic list like "Straight Dope Newsletter Recipients" and that's all that shows up in the To field. 99% of the spam I get does have one of my real addresses in the To field anyway.

Private persons don't generally have the ability to set up mailing lists every time they want to send out a form letter -- like when they're moving or something. If you're mailing to Germans, especially in any kind of commercial way, you may be violating Datenschutz regulations if you disclose email addresses to third parties, and I as a potential customer will be very angry with you if you do that with my address. BCC doesn't disclose your address to anyone else.

The only problem I've had with bccing someone is that they thought the email wasn't meant for them. That last happened 5 years ago though.

I've had the problem several times, but especially with people who use free mail programs like Hotmail or GMX.

Oh well. I use gmx and have never had a problem receiving mails to me when I was only on bcc. Just tested it to make sure. I've got the automatic spam filter turned on, and it doesn't remove mails without my name in to or cc. I'd guess that you'd have to set it up that way on purpose -- turn on spam protection to high rather than medium, which I certainly don't recommend. Anyway, I get an email with the subject lines of all the mails that land in the spam folder anyhow, so if something's in there by mistake, I can see it. (That was also a default setting.)

Not familiar with hotmail.

Anyway, do what you want with your mails, but if my address is in cc with lots of other addresses, the sender gets an angry email from me. The Büro für Existenzgründer just had a big problem with that a couple weeks ago -- they accidentally sent out a mail to about 100 people with everyone's address in cc, and I've gotten about 10 spams since then sent to the address that I'd given only to the BfE. So I've had to change that address -- what a hassle.

Email Riddler

This one looks pretty promising. I haven't used it yet though.

That's not much more sophisticated than my little trick here, which hasn't been harvested in the 8 months I've had it on my website:



As soon as the harvesters can read javascript, both these tricks will be obsolete.