Summary

Spammers use a variety of techniques to collect email addresses. The main sources of email addresses are web pages and Usenet postings.

Providing email addresses on websites is useful, but it will attract spam. They can be disguised from spammers using alternative character representations or JavaScript.

Spammers use a variety of techniques to validate email addresses. By choosing not to reply to opt-out links and spam emails, and refraining from viewing email as HTML, users can limit the tracking of their email addresses.