Understanding spammers
Spam is the only marketing medium in existence that costs the target (that's your company) more than the advertiser. The low-cost nature of this vehicle makes it irresistible to marketers, scrupulous and unscrupulous alike. In order to spam effectively, spammers need two things; a list of email addresses to which they can blast their messages, and a means of delivering these messages in such a way that their true origin cannot be easily traced. This allows spammers to avoid dealing with the repercussions of millions of angry email users. It's this lack of self-identification that defines the truly unscrupulous.

Harvesting the net
Finding email addresses on the Internet is easy. Spammers use automated tools that scour search engines and web sites for anything that looks like an email address. This is called "email harvesting". Check your own web site, or do a Google search for "@yourdomain.com". Chances are, you'll be able to manually harvest quite a few addresses.

Anti-harvesting policies should make their way into your corporate email usage and security policies. Think about creating general delivery group mail boxes (such as "sales@yourdomain.com";) for publication on your Web site instead of actual user mail addresses. It is also a good idea to encourage your users to setup a second email account with a free provider (such as Hotmail) to use for tasks such as registering for software downloads or posting to forums and newsgroups.

Sometimes it is still necessary to publish certain user email addresses on your Web site or in your Web applications. To prevent these (or your group mail boxes) from ending up on spam mailing lists, you will need a method of publishing them that makes them accessible to human users--but not to email harvesting programs. This is generally referred to as obfuscation in security parlance and is pretty easy to do effectively with Domino.