Tips on protecting your new email address from spam

1. Establish a "disposable" email address which you can use on the Internet. Or have multiple "screen names" as they call it in AOL. Have your email program filter mail coming from this account into a separate inbox "junk mail" folder which you can sort through only occasionally. Then every year or so when you begin to get too much junk, get rid of your junk email address and start using a fresh one! Reserve your primary address only for known friends and business uses.
2. Be certain that no newsgroups, Yahoo Groups, and such never see your email address. Don't use your primary email address on the 'net for things like your on-line personal, or posting your address on an alumni site. Do not enter your primary email address into your instant messenger software. When you fill in any sort of on-line registration, don't give your real address. Don't sign up for any type of email list or e-newsletter unless you truly know who is collecting your address and what they do with it.
   • These places are the leading source of addresses for spammers. Some of these sources are scanned and harvested daily by marketers!
   • If your e-mail address has ever been posted anywhere on the Web, you likely already have a significant spam problem. Web "spiders" electronically crawl the Web and assemble e-mail address lists that are fast-included on CDs. Marketers and spammers can buy these CDs, each containing more than 10 million e-mail addresses for under $200.
3. When you do get unsolicited emails that come with instructions on how to "remove yourself from our list", NEVER follow those instructions. Doing so will usually only verify to the spammer that your email address is valid and active! This is a common trick direct marketers use to create email lists that are guaranteed to be valid and active, and they sell these lists for a premium. Do not reply - just delete the email.
4. Many spam marketers build their lists by using automated software that makes educated guesses as to what your e-mail address might be by appending a common name to a popular domain. So if you use use a common_name@common_provider (like SusanB@aol.com or PeterT@mindspring.com or Lucy@att.net) for your primary email, then you will get spam no matter what precautions you take. If you move to a smaller local Internet service provider that gives you an address like Susan@smallname.com you might escape this source of spam.
5. Remember, it only takes one misstep on your part for your address to get into the wrong hands and be completely compromised due to the ease of electronic replication.
6. If your email address must appear on a web page, you should ask your webmaster to use special encoding on your address which makes it invisible to many of the robots which spider the web scanning web pages.

More info can be found at: www.cauce.org