The Computer Corner
The pitfalls of being a guru
By Charles Miller 

Back on October 6, 2007 I wrote in this column that I had changed my email address from faq@smaguru.com to faq7@smaguru.com.

My old email address faq@smaguru.com had become so polluted with unsolicited spam emails that I simply had to abandon using it. At that time, I was receiving more than two thousand junk emails per week.

My personal spam problem was a direct result of my being a public person and my faq@smaguru.com email address being made available to the public on the Atención San Miguel web site.

This is in no way the fault of Atención. Spammers use “bots” or software robots to crawl around the internet “harvesting” valid email addresses found on web sites. They do this as it is easy to do and because email addresses found in this way are very likely to be legitimate addresses.

Once your valid email address is found, it is shared with other spammers who proceed to send you all manner of unsolicited junk mail.

My new email address faq7@smaguru.com made its public debut in Atención on September 21, 2007 and appeared on the www.atencionsanmiguel.org web site on that date as well. With my new email address out there in public, I watched and waited.

For a few days when I would check my email there was nothing there and I caught myself wondering if there could possibly be some technical glitch. On the few days I received emails from Atención readers, this reassured me my email account was indeed working.

The holiday was short lived though. On October 18 the first unsolicited spam email advertising some Canadian pharmacy appeared in my inbox. It had taken only 27 days for my new address to be harvested by the spammers. That day I received one legitimate email from an Atención reader and that one spam. That was the last time the legitimate emails even came close to outnumbering the spam.

The next day it was one more email from a San Miguel resident, and four spam. After a week I was no longer keeping count as the number of spam arriving in my inbox was up to a dozen every day.

I am not qualified as a statistician and not much of a mathematician either, but it does not take a degree to see the trend here. Based on my previous experience with my faq@smaguru.com address, I can predict that if I kept this same address for three years the account will be receiving thousands of unsolicited junk emails every week. That is what happened last time, and it appears fair to say it is happening again albeit this time the numbers seem to indicate it would not take three years to reach the my breaking point.

So, once again I am changing my email address and am continuing this experiment by trying something new this time. Following the suggestion of some anti-spam experts, what I am now doing is trying a little bit of obfuscation.

My email address I will now write out as “faq8 (at) smaguru.com” eschewing the @ sign the spammers robots are programmed to search for. A human will still be able to view and understand that the parenthetical “at” is really “@”, but it is much harder for an automated system to harvest the email address written in that form.

So the little experiment continues, and we will see how long it takes the spammers to ruin another email address.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.