Personal Homepages

Just about everyone has a homepage of their own these days. Almost every internet service provider (ISP) offers you a place to put up your own website.

The problem behind this is that when you do put up your website, you often feel obligated to leave your contact information.

This is not a very good idea if you are looking to avoid spam because you have just advertised your email address. A resourceful person will take down your information so that they can spam you later.

It is rare that anybody thinks that they can receive spam simply from putting out their contact information, but it is the easiest way to do it. Spammers can easily gather all of your information by using what is called “Harvesting Software”.

Harvesting software is basically a program that searches the internet for the @ symbol. In searching for it, they recognize that this is likely an email address and therefore it leaves you open to receive their spam. Most of the time, spammers are unaware if the email address is even active or used at all. That is why they can put out so many of them.

By harvesting as many of the addresses that use the @ symbol, spammers are basically guessing that at least 50,000 emails they send out of 1,000,000 of them will be viable. In most cases, regular people like you prove them right by responding to them.  

Once you reply to one of the spam that you receive, you have announced to them that they can continue to send you email. You should know that they will often report your email address to other companies and their affiliates which will only lead to your receiving even more spam.