Protect Your Email Address

Have you ever wondered how spammers collect email addresses? There are several methods but the most common use spam robots and email harvesters. These applications are on the Internet constantly browsing and recovering information formatted in the classic email format, i.e. example@emailserver.com. These roving harvesters are busily working the Internet and social media sites. They can pick up your email address from your web page or blog, a Tweet and almost anywhere else you post an email address. How can you share your email address and reduce your risk of having it harvested? Use scr.im at http://scr.im .

Scr.im is a free service which will allow you to protect your email address behind a URL (uniform resource locator) that is protected by a “captcha.” A captcha is challenge response test that is commonly used to verify that the computer is responding to a human. Review the scr.im Privacy Statement and Terms of Use at http://scr.im/privacy/ before you sign up. The example from the scr.im site is http://scr.im/1337 - give it a try and then determine if a scr.im URL for your email might be a valuable tool to add to your anti-spam arsenal.

PS – FYI: This tip full of acronyms and techspeak may have added a new term to your lexicon. Just in case you are interested in the etymology for “captcha,” Dictionary.com provided the following: Captcha is the acronym for Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.