Beware of E-mail Harvesters
Have you ever visited an online forum and posted your e-mail address for someone to contact you? It’s a common thing to do. Perhaps the conversation has splintered into a new direction and, being the respectable forum-goer that you are, you’re being courteous to take your conversation outside the confines of the forum. But did you know that your e-mail address is now susceptible to e-mail harvesters?
What’s an e-mail harvester? It’s an automated program, or ‘bot’, that scouts the Internet in search of e-mail addresses. These addresses are then collected and sometimes sold or rented to spammers. You don’t want that!
Or maybe you’re using a P2P network to share files (in which case you shouldn’t, but I won’t tell 
). That’s also a feast for bots.
Methods that I’ve seen used by forum-goers to avert this type of data collection is to spell out the e-mail address. For example, david43 [at] yahoo [dot] com. Even users with a little computer experience can figure that out, but bots can’t. It’s just a matter of time, I suspect, before they actually become that sophisticated though.
So before you open yourself up to spam (and I encourage you to educate your family members, too), check out the forum you’re on. Do they offer a method of contacting other members without exposing or even using e-mail addresses? Personal messaging is one method I’ve seen on forums. This way users have the benefit of communicating with one another in private, while keeping their personal information protected. 
So keep your e-mail address safe!
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