In my last post, The Life Of Riley, I wrote the following: “Send your pet’s information to pet#4kcc.com. (Replace the # symbol with the @ symbol before you try to send.)” Additionally, in another post, Address Book Confusion, I shared: “Of course, I have email addresses – my business one (john at 4kcc.com) and…”

A number of readers asked why I wrote these email addresses in this fashion instead of the normal way, e.g., [email protected]. The answer involves spammers and spambots (computers which have been turned into spam robots). These people and their machines will scan websites and “harvest” any email addresses found on a site. These emails are then put onto a list and sold to spammers. Using this method, these miscreants can gather thousands of email addresses in a short period of time. When this happens, the number of spam emails goes up!

There are a number of ways to prevent this from happening. One of those methods is what I used in my previous posts. I replace the @ with another symbol (#) or with the word which represents the @ sign – “at.” If you have your own website, you should take steps to prevent your site from having email addresses harvested.