What would it do to spamers who troll for email addresses on web pages if I put a address that was extremely long. I just saw a site that give pi to 10 million places. I have plenty of bandwidth on my server to not affect me. I was thinking about just creating a page with no links to it and just have this address.

Hello Tracsoft. thanks for your post.

I only think that very long Email addresses only serve a purpose when endeavouring to deny spammers the opportunity of guessing them - as might occure when a spammer tries to guess (new) addresses on a large network with potentially a significant number of new (novice) subscribers. As one example, I raised an Email address comprising of only three letters on my ISP account, and without any use or distribution whatsoever was targeted within just six days.

Furthermore, extremely-long addresses may simply be ignored or inadvertently truncated by Email harvesters or list compilation software, perhaps to ignore anything abnormal which significantly detracts from that of any ordinary recipient. I have seen some spam-harvesting websites where the email address "unsubscribe" field is limited in length (occasionally to around 20-30 characters), and could explain this - particularly when migrated to a database with predefined field lengths.

However, addresses serving as spam-sinks are ideally those which "fit" with the general run of Email addresses owned by ordinary people across the board, though for "real" personal addresses long Email addresses may help to reduce a limited proportion of spam - on proviso that all systems and software acting on that address (e.g. in replies, etc) can handle them.

My advice is to sustain ordinary address strings for spam-sinks, whatever your flavour.

Incidentally, should you wish to conjure addresses for personal use that are less likely to be harvested and targeted, then you might like to try address strings that include words which many harvesters and worms are set to actually ignore (as might exist for compiling black-lists) - such as...

dont_spam_me@<your URL> (etc).


Brendan