Anti-Spam

Why am I Getting all these Spam E-Mails?

A six month research project into unsolicited commercial email (the original can be found here) was conducted by the Centre for Democracy & Technology (www.cdt.org). The summary of the report is short and can be read in a few minutes, the full report is published on this site here.

Simple Tips for Reducting Spam

There is no foolproof way to avoid receiving spam emails, technology can help but it isn't foolproof. Spam filters often only reduce spam by two thirds and anti-spam filter services at ISP's that use heuristics and statistics to spot spam can be as effective as 97%.

There are some simple guidelines and tips that can be as good at reducing spam as using a spam filter.

Disguise email addresses used on websites or posted in web forums.
URL Encode your email address, this helps to stop automated spam harvesters (programs that trawl the web looking for email addresses) from recognising your email and storing it. For example, our email address is info@axonbirch.com which, when encoded looks like:
```
	
						&#105;&#110;&#102;&#111;&#64;&#97;&#120;
						&#111;&#110;&#98;&#105;&#114;&#99;&#104;
						&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;
					
```
Use our URL Encoded at the bottom of this page to convert your own email address.

Use multiple email addresses.
Register a separate disposable email address for use in chat rooms and in chat forums. This bogus address can just forward email onto your real address and once you start receiving too much junk mail, you can simply drop the address and create a new one. People you trust can still make use of your real email address.

Use longer email addresses that don't have common names.
Spammers often execute Dictionary Spam Attacks. This is where they know a domain exists so they just send email to addresses such as; info@, sales@, john@, chris@, jsmith@ etc. They start with the simple names and addresses that are quite common and move onto combinations of common first and last names. Addresses such as 3x0chris4x2birch123yz@madeupdomain.com will almost never be affected by this kind of attack. Although the email address seems unusable, if combined with the tip above, it provides quite a junk mail free online life.

E-mail URL Encoder

The encoding below is done using javascript executed by your browser, your email address is not sent to or stored by Axon Birch.

	username:
webmail login	password: