Note that we're talking specifically about methods to counter the harvesting programs. If an email address is understandable to a human then it's always possible that the same human may add your name to a spam list manually. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about that except to filter any spam that you receive.

Let's look at some of the methods that email harvesters use to obtain email addresses:

Dictionary or brute force. This is a method where the spammer will use a dictionary of common words and names, joins them in various combinations to create email addresses and then sends email to them. There's no guarantee the email addresses created actually exist, but because this method can be automated, thousands of emails can be sent every day without any intervention at all by the sender. It's common for this type of attack to be used against the popular email services such as HoTMaiL™.

Web harvesting. An automated computer program or script can be designed to crawl it's way around the Web by following hyperlinks that appear on webpages. Along it's way, the program records anything that appears to resemble an email address; usually a sequence of alphanumeric characters surrounding an @ symbol, arranged in specific groups. Anything that has a mailto link will be recorded as an email address too. These are special hyperlinks that when clicked, open up your e

mail application with an email primed with a particular recipient email address. Even if you don't openly publish your email address on a website, if you participate in any online forums then you should be aware that these can be traversed by the harvesting programs too.

USENET newsgroup harvesting. Similar to Web harvesting only that the harvester program trawls through the many thousands of discussion groups, again, looking for anything that resembles an email address to report back.

Email lists. If your email address has ever received even just a single piece of spam through it then it's possible that your email address will be passed on as one in a list of many. These lists of confirmed and unconfirmed email addresses are often used and sold on by spammers.

Once they have your email address…

Once you start receiving a regular rate of spam emails then you can be pretty sure that you've made it onto someone's list. From here on in, the range of spam you'll receive may well vary from offers of a university diploma to diet pills or even worse things like pornography or hate mail. Remember, spammers don't (and can't) discriminate between young or old, male or female email recipients. Pornographic spam emails may be a just nuisance to your average office worker (unless the IT director starts checking people's inboxes), but I'm sure you wouldn't want your children to be receiving them.

How to beat spammers!

Now I don't mean how to beat them physically (I'm sure you could figure that out for yourself!), but the best way to beat spam is to protect your email address and never let spammers get hold of it in the first instance. Even if your email address does manage to make it's way into a spammers address book then all is not lost and that email address may still be useful. As in most cases, prevention is definitely better than the cure in terms of effectiveness!