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Do you know how effective address hiding is for hiding email addresses?
As email has become an essential tool for everyday communication, email spam—unsolicited bulk mail—has grown. Faced with this growing challenge, various address hiding techniques have been proposed to reduce the impact of spam. But how effective are these techniques? This article will describe the main methods of hiding email addresses and their potential effectiveness in protecting users.
Address hiding technology for personal use
For the average user, there are several effective ways to limit the publicity of your email address, thereby reducing the chances of receiving spam.
Carelessly sharing email addresses can lead to them being harvested and used to send spam, so be careful about who you share your personal email with.
Choose who you share with carefully
Sharing email addresses only with a limited group of people is an effective way to reduce the risk of being "harvested" and spammed. When a message must be forwarded to multiple recipients, the "Blind Copy (bcc)" field can be used to hide the addresses of other recipients and further protect personal privacy.
Address obfuscation
Email addresses posted on the web, Usenet, or in chat rooms are particularly vulnerable to harvesting. By obfuscating email addresses, for example, "[email protected]" can be written as "no-one at example dot com", automatic harvesting can be effectively prevented. Related methods also include displaying the email address in the form of an image or using obfuscated text.
Do not reply to spam
Not replying to spam is an important step in preventing your email address from being identified as valid. Many spam emails contain links that direct users to click, which often lead to attacks on their devices.
Use of the contact form
Many businesses and individuals use a "contact form" on their website to receive inquiries in order to avoid publishing their email address. However, this approach may be inconvenient for some users as they cannot use their favorite email client and there is a risk of input errors.
Disposable Email Addresses
Using disposable email addresses can help users reduce risk when they don't fully trust a website. These addresses can be enabled or disabled as needed, or made to expire after a certain number of distributions, allowing users to track down any sites that are leaking their email addresses.
Chinese character password
Some systems use "Kanji passwords" to require unknown senders to include a password in their emails to prove that the emails are not spam. In this way, the filtering system can improve its accuracy and only accept emails that self-identify as "legitimate emails."
The process of reporting spam can be difficult, and even after reporting it, it's often difficult to stop the spam from coming in.
Automation techniques that email administrators can implement
For email administrators, there are a range of tools that can help reduce the spam burden in inboxes. These techniques include:
Authentication System
Most systems support authentication, which allows domain owners to identify which emails are authorized. These systems use DNS to list websites that are authorized to send email.
Challenge/Response System
This method effectively combats spam by requiring unknown senders to pass certain tests to verify their identity.
Blacklist and filter technology
Using DNS blacklist technology, the mail server can quickly check whether the IP from a certain mail connection is included in the blacklist. This is an effective filtering method.
DNS Reverse Lookup Check
Many mail transfer agents perform a reverse DNS lookup to ensure that the sender's IP address has a valid domain name. This is very important for identifying the source of spam.
Hybrid Filtration Technology
Systems such as SpamAssassin use multiple tests to evaluate and combine the scores of each test to determine whether an email is spam. This approach can significantly reduce the chance of misjudgment.
Future Outlook
As email spam techniques continue to grow, our technology for protecting personal email addresses needs to continue to evolve. For example, strict enforcement of industry standards and the use of whitelisting technology for authorization decisions can not only reduce spam but also build trust.
In this era of rapid digital development, how to more effectively protect our email addresses from being abused is a question we need to think about in the long term.
How well can your email address be protected using these technologies?
