Munge has often been defined as "Mash Until No Good". This may be the common definition of the word, but it's not what we are talking about in this article.

What we are talking about is spam. One of the most insidious and pervasive foulnesses on the internet. There are thousands of scumbag spammers working day and night attempting to figure out your email address so they can send you silly emails about products that no person in their right mind would purchase.

How do these sleazeballs find your email address? Well, generally, they get it from you in one way or another. You see, spammers look everywhere for email addresses. They are like cockroaches - they are always waiting in the dark corners of the internet, feeding off of the trash and refuse that falls onto the floor, so to speak.

There are an incredible number of ways that a spammer can get your email address. Here is a short list of a few.

- Spammers have automatic robots which scan newsgroup messages, looking for all of the email addresses that they can find.

- They have additional automatic programs which spider web sites, pulling email addresses off web pages. They especially like to scan through guestbooks, as these tend to be full of juicy email addresses and web site URLs.

- Another common method is to use automatic programs to scan message boards. There are tons of email addresses stored on many of these places.

So what do you do?

You can simply become a lurker and not post to anything. Personally, I don't like this solution as it is tantamount to surrendering to the scumbags.

Another common method is to get one of those free email accounts and use it as your return address. This is very simple, but since those email accounts can fill up with spam very fast, they can become unusable almost overnight.

One easy and straightforward technique is to munge your email address. This means you change your email address in some obvious manner to make it impossible for the automatic spam robots to get the correct name.

Most people will simply add a word like "nospam" or "removetoreply" to their email name. Thus, if your email address is "tom*anywhere.com", you could post under the email address of "tom_nospam*anywhere.com". Spam spiders are not smart enough to remove the "nospam" portion of the address, but most humans see what's going on right away.

This is NOT the correct way to munge your email address.

Instead, change your email address as follows:

tom(at)anywhere.com

tom(at)anywhere(dot)com

tom*anywhere.invalid

tom*anywhere-removetoreply-.com

Do not ever change the name to the left of the * sign, as this puts a burden on your ISP or email provider. You see, when the spammer sends an email message to that address (and that's what he will do when he harvests it off a newsgroup or web site) it will "bounce" at your email provider. This requires that your provider use their resources to handle the invalid email address.

By placing it after the * sign as shown in the example above, you ensure that the email does not ever get to your email provider.

It's usually a good idea to include a short sentence in your posting which explains what you are doing. Something like "If you reply, be sure and remove the '-removetoreply-' from the email address." A good place for this line is in the signature of your email or newsgroup posting.

DO NOT include your actual email address in text form in your signature or the message, as most spam robots look at the text to find email addresses. So your signature might read "to reply send email to tom(at)anywhere(dot)com." Most people are smart enough to figure this out.

This is very common on posts to newsgroups, so don't worry. If people need to respond directly to you they will figure it out. However, in general, newsgroup responses should go to the newsgroup anyway, so it's not critical that your email address be correct.

It's not as useful in email clients and not a very common technique. Very few people will go to the trouble to correct your email address when they are replying to a message from you. Because of this, you may not want to munge the email reply-to address, unless, of course, you are sending an email to a large group or a message board.

Most email and newsgroup clients allow you to specify the reply-to address in the setup or account definition screen. Just put your munged email address in that location instead of your real address. Then set up your signature with the appropriate instructions.

If you are including a munged email address on your web site, be sure and include specific instructions right next to the place where the email address is shown. This is NOT a very common practice on web sites, so you might want to try other methods of hiding your email address first.

Is this effective? Yes, in general it will help cut down on spam from newsgroups, message board postings and web sites. However, it is not perfect and will not stop everything. It's just one more tool in the arsenal we all need to keep in our war against unethical spammers.

Source:
http://www.mailmsg.com/SPAM_munging.htm