> In order to avoid crawlers picking up your Email address you > should spell out the @ in capital letters (AT). Us humans > can read it and understand it but programs can not. > Nancy mobanx2ATsbcgolbal.net This is going to be a little bit lengthy, but I have experienced a few things that others might find worth while and/or slightly funny. Actually, computer programs for reading these things are much better than you think. This old trick of changing "@" to "at" has been known for a long time and the email search bots can deal with it very easily. Computers also combine common names to common domains. The thing that got me the most spam once was when I found out that my company (Hewlett-Packard) allowed it's employees to have 3 different email addresses and I found out that my first name at the company name ([email protected]) was available. Almost instantly, after adding that as a email address for me, I was getting over 100 emails per hour! (and I was in meeting that first couple hours) It took a few hours to get that cleaned up because some email gateway did not get changed back when I turned it off and it took multiple efforts to stop that mess. Also, don't use a common name with just 2 or 3 numbers after it. It takes no time at all and costs practically nothing for a computer to send out a few thousand emails to made up names in search of one that might be real. The person who responded with the single letter and his phone number will do well as long as it isn't harvested from someplace it is archived. I used to help out my church office with their internet and found that email addresses on websites get harvested very quickly. The last time I changed the addresses there, I put a photo type image (gif image) of the address on the web page. It worked well. People could read it, but computers could not (not yet anyway). Don't ever use an important email address on any web forms. Just because a site says they don't sell email addresses means that they don't sell them. Spammers don't have a lot of scruples. If you need to use an address in one of those forms, set up a temporary one at hotmail or yahoo. For my personal domain, I can set up many email addresses, so I make up one, use it, then delete it when it's purpose is complete. I recently did this, started getting about 20 spams per day, then deleted it when I didn't need it any more. Most of those spams were caught by my spam filter at the domain, but I still had to skim through the list or subjects to see if any of them were legit. Spammers harvest emails not just from the body of the text, but also from the header information as well, so make sure your reply address is mangled in some manner for anything that might get saved on a server somewhere (like archived genealogy lists). One good way is to add extra characters in the middle of the name somewhere, then instruct responders to remove that part. One funny one I once saw was something like: [email protected], (drop pants before responding) The problem with that one, is that it will be enough of a problem for some of those who want to reply to you, they just won't bother. It's best to not forward cute chain emails. You don't know how the future recipients will handle the headers in the forwarding they do, or where it might get archived where a spam bot can find it. I've decided to use real email addresses (about a dozen of them), turn on spam filtering on my accounts, and be ready to change the addresses as needed. It's a little bit of a hassle to change them once in a while, but this seems to work fairly well. The address I use for friends and family rarely needs changing, because I am very careful to make sure that not too many people know that one or those. Jerry [email protected]