E-mail me 

To send me e-mail, manually write my address (see below) in your e-mail software (you won't be able to copy-and-paste the address below). Note also that I shall change my address as soon as someone will start to spam it, so check this page for my current address if an older one does not seem to work anymore:

Does my e-mail address look strange? In case you wonder why, this makes it impossible for automated software to read it, but you should have no difficulty to read it correctly.

How can you send me secure e-mail?

Use PGP or one of the compatible program packages (I use PGP Desktop) to encrypt e-mail addressed to me. Using an e-mail client (I use Eudora Pro and Microsoft Outlook) that support PGP encryption will make your life a lot easier. You will also need my public key, which you may obtain, for instance, from the PGP Global Directory by following this link. If you do so, you may be practically certain that e-mail addressed to me is not read by anyone while in transit from your computer to mine. If you desire an encrypted reply to your e-mail from me, I can do the same (in this case, you will also need to deposit your public key with the PGP Global Directory, or send your public (not private!!) key to me. Depositing your key with a key server is less likely to cause you to make something that compromises the security of your key, and you will need to do this only once (as opposed to sending your key to each and everyone you want to receive encrypted e-mail from). Note that sender, addressee, attachments and all the headers (including Subject) are not encrypted, because they must be read while the message is in transit. Therefore, place private information only in the body (i.e., main text) of the message. Encrypt any attachment file before attaching it, if you don't want attachments to be wide open to monitoring. Change the names of any encrypted files before attaching them, if the file names contain information potentially useful to an eavesdropper.

How do spammers harvest e-mail addresses?

Spammers use web spiders (which are automated programs similar to those used by Google and other legitimate web search engines) to read web pages and extract e-mail addresses. This is a simple task, because an e-mail address always has the format somename@domainname.topdomain. Often, the address is accompanied by an HTML link in the format <a href="mailto:somename@domainname.topdomain">, like the above example. Once a large number of addresses are collected, they can be verified by other automatic programs (to eliminate fake addresses, or addresses that no longer work), and used for spamming. For this reason, I am not writing my e-mail address here in a form that can be read easily by a spider.

E-mail addresses can also be harvested by breaching your computer's security. The most common method is by infecting your computer with malicious software, usually sent to you as an e-mail attachment, or downloaded by a specially written web page you may visit while web-surfing. This software will read the address book of your e-mail software, and send all addresses to an Internet server controlled by spammers. In some cases, malicious software can convert your computer into a mail server that sends out spam on a continuous basis. You may suspect that this is the case if your computer slows down excessively and generates significant amounts of Internet traffic without any obvious reason (note that many programs generate moderate amounts of Internet traffic, usually on an occasional basis, for perfectly good reasons like searching and downloading updates).