Over the 7-8 years of my internet usage, these are the things I have realised or learnt how to thwart potential spammers. I’ve had my email address for over 2 years and I get 1-2 spams a month. Pretty good from what I hear other people get. This is without some other kind of spam protector. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, but the list of things I do to stop myself from becoming a spam receptacle.
1 – Don’t unsubscribe from spam. They use that to know if anyone is receiving spam. If you ‘unsubscribe’, this lets them know there is someone on the other end of that email address. Then they put your email address on a big list which they will probably sell to other spammers. Then you get more! Sneaky buggers.
2 – Don’t put your email address just ANY where! spammers try to get emails from many places. Probably the most common is trawling(automated program for gathering data, in this case, your email address) the websites for email addess’. If you ever put your page on a website, change it in a way that will confuse spam trawlers but humans can figure out like this:
original email address:
blag@halo.com
spam resistant email address’:
blagNO@SPAMhalo.com
blag (at) halo.com
blag AT halo DOT com
Be creative with this so that there is no standard of fakes, or spammers will learn this and get around it.
doing this, you should also mention below or above where the email is, how to make it normal. Eg,
b~l~a~g~@~h~a~l~o~.~c~o~m
remove all ~’s to email me
3 – If you use a preview frame to read your mail, turn off the show images option. Spammers can use these images to determine if anyone is on the other end, much like the unsubscribe trick.
4 – Be careful what your sign up for online. Get a free web based email account that you use only your signing up for things. If it ever starts getting lots of spam, just delete that account and make another one. If you have your own domain name and access to making multiple email address’, make a new email address for each thing you sign up for.
5 – Even be careful about stating your email address in chats. Especially IRC where it is common for chat logs to be posted on a website. Once this happens, your address is there for the taking.
This is the one that has got me some spam 
Following these hints doesn’t mean you won’t get ANY spam, but it will certainly reduce the amount you get. Remember though, you may have already done the damage so while you should still follow these points, you will still get spam. The amount you get should fall over time though.
If you have some other methods and I am sure there are some, please comment.
factoid for today: If your standing in the water and a crocodile is near or brushes past your legs, stand perfectly still. It will hopefully think your legs are just logs.
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About
Cris Pearson from Melbourne, Australia.
Grew up in George Town, Tasmania.
CEO, co-founder, interaction + interface + graphic
+ web designer at plasq.
We are best known for Comic Life which was bundled with Millions of Apple Macs and now the much lauded, Skitch!.
Non plasq projects:
Loqalize - Open software translation web service
tequp - tech and art meetups
UI Review - Flickr group for peer UI reviews
DOH!
mt-blacklist deleted a friends(tav) comment on here cause it contained the word F*u#C!K. I had the brain wave to quickly go to google and see if it was cached.. it was!! woo.. i’ll paste it in below.
o little spam! makes me jealous ;p
here are some thoughts on your good spam reduction techniques:
1. very good advice on the unsubscribing trick.
in addition, i would suggest being wary about clicking on urls sent in emails by friends. check them for parameters which might be referencing your email address, either through unique ids or sometimes even directly (foo.com?e=foo@blah.com)
i fell for this one in one of the “passion” greeting cards that a lover sent me. try urls without providing any of the extra variables – you can often see the same content without providing automatic quality control for spam databases.
2. i would say that most decent email harvesters used by spammers are now capable of handling most of the “human-readability” protections that you describe above.
here’s my preferred form of email obfuscation, which too would of course soon be assimilated into spam-tech, but for now is cool:
document.write(‘’)tav@espians.comdocument.write(‘’)
it makes the email address both clickable (even downgrades well to non-javascript supporting browsers!), copyable, and you don’t have to waste time explaining to the not so enlightened as to why you have NO SPAM in the middle of your email addresses…
3. this is a pretty cool trick used by spammers. simple, yet very elegant.
i just wish that more email clients had support for optionally turning off images. i have only seen ximian evolution do that.
4. if you are using qmail, and have your email account set up right, you can automatically make up as many email addresses as you please, with no extra admin hastle… e.g. tav-someshitwebsite@espians.com would work.
this way, i can:
use a unique email address for every website that forces me to sign up
filter mails pretty easily. start getting spam on tav-foo@espians.com? guess where those emails go to? that’s right, /dev/null
track which of those f-u!c%kers sold your email address.
anyways, as much as taking these measures is beneficial, it doesn’t solve the underlying problems with mail spam, which are that:
a) the way email works is crap.
b) there are some naive individuals out there, who obviously do fall for the spam, and thus do make it worthwhile for the spammers to waste the rest of our time.
c) this then affects us because, again, email is pretty poorly designed.
my thoughts on this are to have a complete reversal to how we approach messaging. instead of people sending mails to your address, you should simply check the outbox of your friends (those in your trust matrix).
does talon have a message for me? does john? does …?
of course, there is the question of how do you then get messages from people who don’t know you…?
there, a combination of transitive trust (i.e. does that person know someone that you trust, and be able to pass the message on through them?) combined with other methods (such as usage of reputation backed currencies) would prove pretty satisfactory.
and, failing that of course, one could revert to a system similar to the current system, but use some slightly better methods such as the bayesian filtering techniques that have been implemented as a result of this article on spam href=”http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html”>http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
and, perhaps use a system of overlapping distributed seed data sets for the filtering?
starts off by checking against your personal profile, then the collective profile of those who you work closely with, then… all the way up to a global one.
anyways, need to run off now. hope it makes sense, if not, i’ll be happy to rephrase/elaborate.