Cookies and Temporary Internet Files

Spammers use a software program called spiders to access and harvest your email address. These spiders basically just wander around the internet and into active browsers searching for your email information. To be more specific, they are looking for the @ symbol so that they can attach themselves to email addresses.

These spiders are very intelligent, but not intelligent enough to know the difference between a legitimate email address and a simulated address. They grab everything and harvest the information to their own database. They can also sometimes grab information from your browser that is not an active or viable email address. These come in the form of cookies and temporary internet files.

If you don’t know what cookies and temporary internet files are, they are they are the record that your computer takes of your online surfing. It is how your computer is able to bring up recently typed in information and quick launching any sites that you want to revisit.

The reason the spiders harvest your cookies and temporary internet files is because the cookies are saved in a manner that resembles an email address. Cookies look like this: MBrown@anywhere.com   they usually take on the registered name that the computer is registered to and doesn’t leave a website’s name.

You could gather up to 50 cookies a day depending on how many websites that you visit during the day. Since the spiders don’t know the difference between real email addresses and cookies, you would do better to clean out your cookies and temporary internet files at least twice a week; more if you surf a lot. Here is how to do it from windows.

You can begin by double clicking programs, then accessories, then system tools, and then click disk clean up. Click okay when that box comes in and you can delete your old files and cookies. You can also remove your cookies and temporary internet files by:

Right clicking start, click settings, then control panel. Go into your internet options icon. In there you can follow the instructions for you to clean up your computer by deleting both cookies and temporary internet files.

It is a relatively easy thing to do once you get used to it. In doing this, you are getting rid of the extra files on your computer that these spiders are looking for. It is just an extra precaution that is good to take