Why is the email address written like that?

And how do I make it useable?

Well, if you use the internet a lot or you know your computers, you will have heard of spam. If you haven't, spam is unwanted, unsolicited, corporate or junk email. Spam is one of the biggest resource and finance wasting nuisences on the net at this time other than viruses.

Basically, this is the crap that fills your email account that you didn't ask for. If you use Hotmail, you know what I mean. Research has shown that it costs businesses millions of dollars in wasted resources due to transporting or blocking junk email and employees' wasted time either opening and reading, or filtering and deleting spam.

It is also not unknown for unscrupulous net users to launch spam attacks against companies or ISPs (Internet Service Providers - the people with whom you have your internet connection account). Not long back, a Dictionary spam attack was launched against British ISP Telewest, who provide internet connectivity using the brandname Blueyonder. A dictionary attack is where the spammer uses a program to spawn millions of emails by using pretty much every comination of words it can think of for the email address and sends it to those addresses, or fakes the addresses it is sending from using the results of the dictionary process so some lucky recipient gets millions of emails from different addresses making it difficult to block. It's much more detailed than that, but you get the idea. As a result of this attack, Blueyonder ground to a halt and at one stage reported a backlog of email at a staggering 700GB. If you don't know what a GB is, it stands for Giga Byte. To put things into perspective, a regular email is between 3 and 10 KiloBytes (KB). A MegaByte (MB) is 1024 times a KB and a GB is 1024 times the size of a MB. Thats A LOT of emails.

Anyway, other research has proven that the best way to get on a spammers list of target addresses is to have your address publicly visble on the net.

A common method of gathering email addresses for spamming is to use an address harvester which is basically an automated piece of software that trawls the net looking for webpages that contain email addresses. These are easy to spot as they are a set of characters featuring an @ symbol and one or more . symbols without any spaces in it. The harverster would just take the whole character string that contains those symbols and add it to it's address database. The spammer would then just mail every address in the database.

It doesn't actually matter to the spammer whether the address is real or not as they will be sending from a fake address anyway and therefore will not recieve the bounces from the mail servers rejecting the address. Some other poor soul will get them. A bounce is a reply from an email server to inform the sender that the specified delivery address does not exist. A spam attack will generate thousands if not millions depending on the size of the attack. The spam email will be the same for every address so the spammer needs to make only one and sending it millions of times requires little effort on the spammer's part. The resultant barrage of spam will eat resources of the servers while they process, deliver and forward it or if they notice it's an attack, block it.

So how do I make it useable?

For this reason, all addresses on this site will be written in meATmydomainDOTcom format. The logic behind this is that it removes the identifiable @ and . symbols therefore causing spam harversters to overlook the address as regular text. To turn this into a usable address simply insert the symbols that are spelt in capitals, so meATmydomainDOTcom becomes me@mydomain.com. It's that simple, you just have to make sure you change the capitals for the symbols that they spell.

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