Address munging - Definition and Overview

Address munging is the practise of disguising, or munging, an E-mail address to prevent it being automatically collected and used by spammers.

Intent

The intent of disguising an address is to prevent the use of software recognition while giving enough clues for a human reader to easily reconstruct the original address. An undisguised E-mail address in the form "no-one@example.com" is easily recognised by computer software, allowing large-scale harvesting of publicly available addresses. Addresses posted on usenet or webpages are both vulnerable to this. There is no need to use disguise on private E-mail as private messages between individuals are not subject to scanning by spammers. However E-mail sent to a mailing list, which is then archived or passed onto a Usenet news server and made public, may eventually be scanned.

Methods

The most common method of disguising an address is to replace the "@" symbol with the word "at", and any "." with "(dot)" -- giving a result that does not look like an E-mail at all. Other methods involve manipulating the address so that it is incorrect but still recognisable as an address, and leaving human-readable instructions for recovery of the original in the signature block of the E-Mail or usenet post. However these methods are less satisfactory, as anything resembling an address will attract harvesters and attempts at spam. So the following points are important:

• Ensure the disguised version is not someone else's E-mail address. This can be done by appending the reserved top level domain .invalid to the end.
• If you are disguising an address by adding text, then add it to the right-hand side of the "@" not the left. This prevents your internet service provider's mail server from having to handle undeliverable mail.

Examples

Disadvantages

Disguising addresses makes it more difficult for people to send E-mail to each other and is, at best, a workaround for the problem of spam. When posting to usenet it should also be noted that disguising an email address is, in the strictest terms, a violation of RFC 1036. This RFC describes the format of usenet messages and requires a valid email address in the From: field of the post. In practise, few people follow this so strictly.

See also

• Netiquette
• Bot

External links

• Address Munging Frequently Asked Questions (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq/munging-address/)
• Article discussing why address munging is wrong (http://www.interhack.net/pubs/munging-harmful/)
• RFC 1036 - covers the format of usenet posts (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1036.html)