Beware of E-mail Harvesters

Posted by Ken

New here? You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.