Recently I have been buying a lot of domain names for resale and I have had to provide contact information that is publicly accessible in the whois database. This database is widely used by spammers to harvest email addresses. But I figured out a way to make my email address public whilst limiting the number of spammers that harvest it. The key is to create an email address with the words "nospam" in it.

The idea behind this is simple. Lots of users disguise their real email addresses by adding nospam to it. Then they instruct their friends to remove nospam before using their email address. In fact this technique is so common that spam software has adapted to it and it automatically removes "nospam" from any email address that contains it. So by creating an email address that does contain "nospam" in it you are fooling spammers into using the wrong address. For example my domains carry the email address domain-nospam@abdussamad.com . Spam bots harvest it as domain-@abdussamad.com which is non-existent. Of course I do remind humans that the email address is to be used without modification by making that clear in a note in the address field. How well has this technique worked? In more than a month since making this email address public I have recieved only two spam messages. In my book thats not too bad.