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Keep your e-mail address more private
To avoid e-mail address harvesting practices, it's important to not post (in text) your e-mail address in public Internet chat rooms, on any Web site, newsgroup, guestbook or blogs to which you post. If you find you need to post an e-mail address, try typing your address in a graphics program and using an image of your address in a signature file or attachment. Or, you can also replace common characters (such as the @ or .) with spaces or spelling. For example, writing your address as
"webmaster — at— webopedia —dot— com" is one way to display your e-mail address so humans can understand it, but software or script harvesters cannot grab it and add it to a spam list.
You can also consider encoding your e-mail address by using its equivalent decimal entity. To people viewing the address in a browser, it appears as normal text. The code, however, consists of character entities and unreadable to many harvesting scripts (example e-mail address encoder). If you plan to take part in online forums or newsgroups, or you plan to join different mailing lists, you can always register for a free online Web mail account. This will help filter the bulk of spam from publicly posting your e-mail address to one e-mail account that is not used for family, friends or work-related communications. It doesn't mean your other accounts won't get spam, but it will help you time-wise by enabling your other account to have less spam build-up.
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