Mung Brain Dripping

How to MUNG (or Mash Up until No Good) your Email Address to avoid spammers

It’s imperative in the modern computer age to avoid putting your email address out there for spammers to find. One way spammers find you is by searching new webpages for email addresses. This includes guestbooks, blogs & news-group postings. Since they spammers are too lazy to get real jobs they’re obviously too lazy to actually READ the whole internet so they employ software to do the scanning for them. This is called Email Harvesting. To avoid being “harvested”, the best advice I can give you is to Mung the hell out of your address.

The word Mung stands for Mash Up until No Good and was started by those UBER GEEKs over at MIT. Basically, you create an email address that can be deciphered with the human brain, but looks like nothing to the robotic spiders that crawl the web looking for addresses.

The easiest method of disguising an address is to replace the symbols with the word they represent. IE:

foobar at example (dot) com

While this method works, it’s likely that the harvesting programs are smart enough to beat it. You have to get more creative! For example. Reverse some of the letters or add extra sub-domains.

foobar at liamg dot moc
foobar@gmail.deletethis.com
foobar [at] somewhere {dot} calm
fXXbar@hXtmail.cXm (Replace the letter X with the letter O)

More munging = better. If it still looks like an email address, keep munging until only the human mind is mangled enough to see it as an email address! The mail servers of the world don’t need extra spam. Also: be careful not to accidentally use someone’s real address.

foobar %at% [google’s new email service] period C0M

munglikekungfoobarrelaterthannetscapeopledottedlinecommercial.

If actually including your email address in a webpage that you control, use a better method of Obfuscation. Either hide the fact that it is an email address by replacing the @ with a graphic of the “@” symbol or use the ascii representation. For example, obfuscate@ericles.com would become:

obfuscate@e
ricles.com

Check the source code if you don’t believe me that this works. =]

The method I prefer uses Javascript to completely fool the spiders. Knock on wood, it hasn’t failed me and I’ve been using it for years. Check out the source code any time you see an address on one of my pages (this one included) and feel free to rip the script for your own use.

Other Mung Links:

Obfuscate your address here: http://www.rpgiv.com/cgi-rpg/omail

Use hilarious dialects to mung entire websites: http://www.illuminated.co.uk/mung/

The origin of the word “MUNG”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mung

Finally, how to stop email abuse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopping_e-mail_abuse

I can be safely emailed here: (Address java protected and a graphic is displayed if javascript is disabled)
Click for Current Address

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