How can I stop the senders of spam email getting hold of my email address?

When you open a new email account, there’s a grim inevitability that you’ll start receiving unsolicited correspondence from strangely-named individuals like Netherlands F. Quintuplet, offering “genuine replicas” of Swiss watches, and suffixed with a passage from classical literature to ensure that it sneaks past spam filtering software. “Since 1998, I’ve got through five email addresses,” writes Toby James, “abandoning each one as it becomes swamped with ads for Viagra.”

How to stamp it out at source? “The only 100 per cent insurance,” says Andrew Lochart from corporate email security experts Postini, “is not to have an email address.” Short of this rather drastic measure, you can minimise spam intake by ensuring that your email address is neither widely available nor easily guessable. “Spammers sometimes use lists of surnames,” writes Les May, “putting each letter of the alphabet in front of each one, and then trying every major ISP and email provider.” We should pity, then, the poor soul who owns j.smith@hotmail.com, whose mailbox is no doubt inundated with junk – and whose situation will no doubt be exacerbated by the inclusion of the address in this column. Also, if you own a domain name, make sure your mailbox isn’t receiving mail for every possible address permutation, as is happening to Michael Blake: “I’m receiving bogus undelivered mail messages that supposedly originated from non-existent addresses at my domain, e.g. pkgmnkx@mydomain.co.uk.” The solution is to ask ask your web hosting provider to turn off any “catch-all” options, and set up individual mailboxes instead.

It may sound obvious, but don’t reply to spam, pleading with them to stop. This merely serves to confirm your spamability, and is the equivalent of hanging a sign outside your house saying “do not burgle between 9am and 5pm, I won’t be in.” But the spammer’s main weapon is the spambot, a program which trawls the internet searching for likely email addresses. “Make sure that your address never appears on any webpage,” writes Cesare Bianchi, “and that includes your own website, blogs, forums and any Word and PDF documents that may be linked to.” Using a false or slightly altered (“munged”) address when participating in online discussion is an easy measure to take, but for those who want to be contactable via their own website, it’s something of a headache. A handy javascript trick can be found at www.tinyurl.com/m4o96, which I’ve used for a couple of years, now. “But whatever measures you take,” says John Bullas, “someone with the best intentions will end up posting your address online.” So it’s really about damage limitation – and then, of course, equipping yourself with a decent filtering system to cope with the inevitable deluge.

Manuela Ledermann writes with a question: “It’s great to be able go online outside the home and the office – but why aren’t wireless hotspots more widespread and more affordable?”