Spam (or unsolicited commercial email) has become one of the largest problems on the Internet today. A recent report indicated that as much as 80% of email to hotmail.com email accounts is spam. AOL recently announced that they block as many as two billion (yes, billion with a B) spam messages PER DAY.
So, what can be done about this? A recent study by the Center for Democracy and Technology examined where spam senders find email addresses to send spam to. They found that while newsgroups are still periodically harvested for email addresses, the most spam they received was to email accounts where the email address was posted on a web site. It appears that the senders of spam use web crawlers to find email addresses in the same way that search engines use web crawlers to find and index relevant information.
The best ways to protect against spam were to either never post your email address on a web site. If you need to do so, then the best way to do this is to hide email address so that it doesn't look like an email address. The study found that such hidden email addresses never received spam. Furthermore, the study found that within six months of removing (or obscuring) an email address that was already online, the spam that the account received dropped significantly.
The IT Security Office has written an email obfuscator which can be used to create HTML instructions that can replace your email address in current or future web pages. Just type in your email address below and use the results returned in place of your email address in a web page.