e mail address question @ or at

recently i have been getting a lot of spam e mail .i am with eircom.from previous threads other people here have the same problem with eircom. normally i would not care the spam seem to be sent from random names john, pat, mike, etc .but the other night i got one from my own address joe blogg@eircom.net example
it stated the usual ,subscribed to so so click x to unscribe ,usual hook. i hate that other people out there will open this see my e mail address and start complaining to me about it.someone said it was bots that got names on internet but would they be be able to get the full address?
my question is this i deal with a number of companies on the net placing orders ,magazine subscriptions etc .for which they need to send me a order confirmation email when i order something from them . at present that is joe blogg@eircom.net assume these confirmation emails are sent out automatically by their computer . now if i send them out a email address joe blogg at eircom.net. will they now have to enter that manually every time they deal with me .not sure they would be equipped to deal with that, or will i just have to stay with the@

I'm not sure if you can stop the damage that has already been done. In future, be careful who you give your email address to.

As for the '@' or 'at', I think most websites use a form type page where you fill in the fields, so if you put joebloggsateircom.net in the field it will simply give an error telling you that's not a proper e-mail address.

The bit after the "@" in an email address is the domain name or registration point for the user, in your example "joe bloggs". It works like your house number, street name and town on a paper mail envelope and directs the sending computer(s) to the location of a specific "joe bloggs" at a specific address on the internet as there may be many "joe bloggs"es out there in internet-land.

While being careful about who you give your email address to is sensible, it isn't foolproof as there are programs running "out there" designed to recognise emails amongst all the other traffic on the superhighway and they strip out the addresses (and sometimes the content) from emails for use by spammers, spoofers and phishers.

All of the above assumes in-clear, non-encrypted, communication.

A lot of spam also originates from spammers who just churn through automatically generated addresses some of which will eventually hit real recipients - e.g. club.man@blah.com, clubman@blah.com, cman@blah.com, clubm@blah.com etc. etc.

The volume of Spam to eircom.net email addresses has increased a lot recently - I've got 2 addresses and am getting several messages per day at the moment. Not all are identified as spam by my Norton Anti-Spam, but they're very obvious from the subject titles....

It had gone relatively quiet (one or two per day) but logged on twice today and got about 10 between my 2 addresses.

I've got email accounts with other domains as well and they're rarely if ever hit with spam.

I don't give my email address out terribly often, so I suspect the bombardment is due to bots as described by Clubman.

I've just deleted over 23 thousand spams from my inbox for Nov, Dec and Jan.
If you use email, you're going to get spam.

mathepac said:

While being careful about who you give your email address to is sensible, it isn't foolproof as there are programs running "out there" designed to recognise emails amongst all the other traffic on the superhighway and they strip out the addresses (and sometimes the content) from emails for use by spammers, spoofers and phishers.

Click to expand...

That's the first I've heard of it. I don't think that's happening or we'd have even more spam by now.

Spammers normally trawl web pages looking for addresses. They also will try and steal databases of e-mail addresses from companies that have them. Another tactic is a 'dictionary' attack where they'll target a big ISP like eircom.net and go after all the murhpys, doyles etc '@eircom.net'. Another source is when a machine has been infiltrated by spyware which sends your address book to spam central.

On average, for me, a new e-mail address survives for 12 months before I have to change it.

Technologist said:

That's the first I've heard of it. I don't think that's happening or we'd have even more spam by now.

Click to expand...

Not sure about the spammers doing it but others may be...

I use hotmail set to exclusive - which means I have to explicitly allow contacts to send email directly into my inbox. When I'm expecting something from a new party I will check my junk mail - and I have a glance every so often to see what amazing offers on viagr4 or ci@lix are going.

It seems to work - the only junk mail that gets through is the rubbish my dad forwards on to me

That's what I do too. Only I use Outlook Express so to mark a new address as "safe" I have to log into the webmail interface...

worth running a virus check. just to make sure your pc is not firing out those emails.