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Email Address munging is the practice of disguising, or munging, an e-mail address to prevent it being automatically collected and used as a target for people and organizations who send unsolicited bulk e-mail. Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, no-one@example.com, becomes no-one at example dot com, for instance. Any e-mail address posted in public is likely to be automatically collected by computer software used by bulk emailers — a process known as e-mail address harvesting — and addresses posted on webpages, Usenet or chat rooms are particularly vulnerable to this.  Private e-mail sent between individuals is highly unlikely to be collected, but e-mail sent to a mailing list that is archived and made available via the web or passed onto a Usenet news server and made public, may eventually be scanned and collected.

There are two basic strategies for address munging. The first is to modify the addresses on your site in such a way that they are invalid but easily fixed by human beings, the second is to hide addresses on your pages so spambots cannot find them. Both strategies are discussed below.

You can make your address technically invalid by inserting random text that spambots won’t be able to recognize as not being part of the address, but most human beings will understand they need to remove before sending to you. For example, examine the same addresses expressed in three different ways:
carol@REMOVETHISexample.com
carolDELETEBEFORESENDING@example.com
Zarol@example.Zom (replace Zs with Cs)

Spambots will still harvest these addresses, but when spammers send to them their messages will bounce. Unfortunately, this continues to create traffic on the network and your mail server. More troubling, many legitimate visitors to your website will incorrectly demung your address and therefore be unable to send messages to you.

The second strategy is to hide addresses from spambots so they are never even harvested. If you want to hide your addresses from spambots, you must understand how they work. Most spambots find addresses by looking for patterns of text that look like an email address. For example, email addresses always contain an @. Spambots therefore scan the text of a webpage to find any @s. If you eliminate the @ from addresses then most spambots won’t be able to recognize that your addresses:
carol-at-example.com
carol(at)example.com
carol AT example DOT com

While this hides your address from spambots, visitors to your site will often still incorrectly demung your address, or not even recognize it is an email address, and therefore be unable to contact you.

A more sophisticated version of hiding your address, which still allows human users to see the addresses without any apparent munging, involves using ASCII character codes. ASCII character codes are like machine language for representing characters on a web page. For example, if you want to represent an @ you can either use the character itself, or you can use it’s ASCII character code: @ (ampersand number-sign six four semi-colon).

If you use the ASCII code then human visitors to your site will see an @ because their browsers automatically translate the character code. However, most spambots currently do not recognize the codes and therefore ignore addresses created with them. The following addresses will all appear the same if they are included in the HTML of your site:
carol@example.com
carol@example.com
carol@example.com

• Email scam: A scam email is nothing but a fraudulent business scheme sent by an email. The “request for help” type of e-mail fraud takes this form. An e-mail is sent requesting help in some way, but including a reward for this help as a “hook,” such as a large amount of money, a treasure, or some artifact of supposedly great value. Other form of fraudulent help requests is represented by romance scam. Under this, fraudsters (pretended males or females) build online relationships, and after some time, they ask for money from the victims, claiming the money is needed due to the fact they have lost their money (or their luggage was stolen), they have been beaten or otherwise harmed and they need to get out of the country to fly to the victim’s country.
• Email Spoofing: E-mail sent from someone pretending to be someone else is known as spoofing. Spoofing may take place in a number of ways. Common to all of them is that the actual sender’s name and the origin of the message are concealed or masked from the recipient. Many, if not most, instances of e-mail fraud use at least minimal spoofing, as most frauds are clearly criminal acts. Criminals typically try to avoid easy traceability.
• Email Phishing: Email Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an email. A user is directed to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Even when using server authentication, it may require tremendous skill to detect that the website is fake.

E-mail spam or junk e-mail involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. It is the most common form of spam nowadays. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Spammers collect e-mail addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users’ address books, and are sold to other spammers. They also use a practice known as e-mail appending or epending in which they use known information about their target (such as a postal address) to search for the target’s email address. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. Spam averages 78% of all e-mail sent.

• Appending: If a marketer has one database containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers of prospective customers, they can pay to have their database matched against an external database containing email addresses. The company then has the means to send email to persons who have not requested email, which may include persons who have deliberately withheld their email address.
• Image spam: Image spam is an obfuscating method in which the text of the message is stored as a GIF or JPEG image and displayed in the email. This prevents text based spam filters from detecting and blocking spam messages.
• Blank spam: Blank spam is spam lacking a payload advertisement. Often the message body is missing altogether, as well as the subject line. Still, it fits the definition of spam because of its nature as bulk and unsolicited email.
• Backscatter spam: Backscatter is a side-effect of e-mail spam, viruses and worms, where email servers receiving spam and other mail send bounce messages to an innocent party. This occurs because the original message’s envelope sender is forged to contain the e-mail address of the victim. A very large proportion of such e-mail is sent with a forged From: header, matching the envelope sender.

Lot of email list management companies’ nowadays are concerned about the email sign ups in paper. The major issue is that when a subscriber enters his email address, while writing he might make a typo. There are thousands of email addresses getting registered with free email service providers like yahoo, gmail, aol, hotmail etc. Now, even a change in an alphabet can cause the email to go to unintended recipient. The point is that we don’t have an option to confirm the email addresses obtained from a paper. Obtaining email addresses on paper can lead to problems. Errors in data entry can cause incorrect addresses to be inputted. Even worse, if you enter the address of a person who is vocally anti-spam, it could sabotage your list. So, the best rule of thumb is to let the subscribers use your website sign up form to enter their email address. Also, make sure that the sign up form follows the double opt-in procedure. In this case, there won’t be any issues of typo as the subscriber has to verify their email address before receiving the newsletters.

In the summer of 2008, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an update of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM), that aims to reduce the number of unlawful email campaigns.

Here are some key points from the CAN-SPAM Act that you should keep in mind to keep your emailing efforts running smoothly:

• Your email must provide a simple, hassle-free and cost-free way to unsubscribe from your list. You do not need to worry about this when using our system to send emails because we automatically include an unsubscribe link in your outgoing messages.
• Always include a valid physical postal address in your commercial emails. Post office boxes can now be used to satisfy the requirement.
• The “sender” is responsible for unsubscribing email recipients who opt-out. You are identified as the “sender” if your company, brand, or employee name appears in the “From” field of the email message. Again, our system takes care of unsubscribers for you by automatically including a unsubscribe link in your messages.
• If you have been requested to manually unsubscribe a list member, make sure to take care of the opt-out request within 10 days.