Tips to avoid your email ids from getting into the hands of spammers

Having had a taste (with some research) as to how & where spammers look for email addresses, I now have a clear idea of how to protect your email addresses from being used by spammers. Though you cannot do much unless you are a mail server admin here are few tips that I think if followed will provide much more security for your mail addresses.

A) Mailing habits:

a. Don’t ever reply to a spam. By doing so you may confirm that your email is valid and also verify that it’s an active account. Also don’t be tempted by messages that say "mail here to unsubscribe", they never work.
b. When mailing to large use group always use Bcc. If you are using cc your friend’s addresses are visible to everyone else. This method is very efficient for spammers because of the density of the email addresses.
c. Make sure that you remove extraneous email addresses from forwarded mail. Again this is has a high density of email addresses.

B) Web pages, chats and groups habits:

a. Never publish your emails online. Even if it’s an absolute necessary, mask you email address. The mail character that spammer’s bots look for in a web page is “@”. There are lots of ways by which you could mask your email address. Some of the masking techniques that are already being used are
i. Use an image to display your email address on web pages. Therefore the bots are sure to miss them.
ii. Or, you could use an image just for the @ character.
iii. You could use java script in your pages to inserts email addresses on the fly.
iv. Or you could represent your email address in hex as shown below. Again masking the @ character.
v. Instead of displaying your mail address in your site you may opt for a form which allows visitors to contact you using backend scripting.

b. Never participate in an online discussion list or forum if they post your email address to their site.
c. Never type your true email address into a web form & never use the "Mail this Document to a Friend" web forms. Some of the websites sell your email addresses to spammers. You could instead use a temporary mail address.
d. You can redirect the spammer’s bots to a "dead-end" page on your site, because some email address harvesting tools don't bother to mask their identities (i.e. they don’t pretend to be a browser so you could know they are something else).
e. Never use your original email id to chat in chat rooms. Most of these chats rooms have automated robots to extract user names (which are valid email addresses in that domain).