email

[jedda]

having been spammed to death by a porn site for weeks, i decided to delete my outlook express email account, how long do you think that i should leave it before reactivating it. and how can i stop my email being harvested from my webspace.

[peanut]

just create a new one with a new address. to do so you will need to contact your isp.

[ajmmac]

hi jedda--i never use my isp email address with outlook express--far better is gmail or i believe it is now googlemail after some court case--somepeople don't like it cos it keeps all ur mail on their server--thats cos u get about 2 1/2 gigabytes of storage--but u can always delete them--another point is joining is by invitation so if u want post back i'll invite u to join--anyway i virtually never get spam--my mail is:
ajmmac AT gmail.com

[Ralph]

Realistically, you'll get spam to your email address for ever, or maybe just a little bit less than that. Spammers don't pay for the bandwidth they use and they don't even usually own the PC's that send out the spam mails so you're now just an entry on a distribution list that will get bombarded constantly. Best get yourself a new address.

The best way to protect it from being harvested from a web page is to put it up as a jpeg image since computers can't actually read this. If you want to hyperlink it, you can encrypt the address using javascript so that it only becomes unencrypted when it pops up in a mail message on the machine of the person who clicked your link. It might actually be fairly straightforward, but I honestly haven't a clue how to do it.

An easier way is to "mung" it like ajmmac has done by typing AT instead of @. I'd recommend going a bit further than this since it's very easy to recode the address harvesting bot to replace at with @ in any email address-like code it finds. Slightly better would be ajmmac AT gmBLAHBLAHBLAHail.com with a note to a potential mailer to remove the obvious from the address.