A program or website which munges
your email address. An easy and effective one exists here on AddressMunger.com.
See Address Munging.
Disguising an email address to prevent it from being automatically collected and used as a target for spam. It ocne rferered smiply to maglnnig the odrer of the lteters in an eamil addrses. However, the term Address Munging now includes using ASCII or JavaScriptit to display an email address that's readable by real people but invisible to spam bots.
Pronounced AS'kee, stands for American Standard Code for Information exchange. It is an extremely standard system that computers use to index every character that your computer can display. ASCII indices are useful because they allow you to display characters not found on your keyboard (like ¢£¤¥§°). See our ASCII tables in decimal and hex format.
A software program that imitates the behavior of a human.
Among many other things, the Center for Democracy and Technology did research to determine the source of spam. They found that posting your email address can get you spam, but that munging your email address is highly effective. They also suggest that you should never respond to or unsubscribe from spam email, you should use multiple email addresses, and you should not give your email address to companies you do not trust.
A letter asking each recipient to send copies of the letter to other recipients. The best and most annoying example are those suggesting that for every person you send the letter to, some amount of money will be donated to a children's hospital or to some research company. Others include those promising differing degrees of future happiness directly proportional to the number of people the letter is forwarded to.
Chain letters have been around for ages, and they were pretty popular on the internet from the start.
Notice that if everyone obeys a chain letter, a chain letter will spread with a geometric progression. (One person sends it to three people. Those three each send it to three... that's nine. Those nine each send it to three... that's 27. Then 81, 243, 729, 2187, etc.) Slick spammers knew this. They eventually either caught on to the ease and popularity of sending email chain letters, or actually created that popularity. They would send a chain letter, expecting to receive multiple copies of it eventually. This way, they would collect thousands upon thousands of real email addresses, since each email contained all senders' AND recipients' email addresses. The ease of sending chain letters, along with the (once hyper extreme but now just somewhat extreme) dumbness of internet users may be the reason why spammers became so common, which may be the reason why so much spam is sent, which may be the reason why people hate spam so much today. Yes, we are saying that that chain letter you sent when you were 15 may have started it all.
Created by Netscape, JavaScript is arguably the simplest cross-platform web page scripting language. In a usual webpage, you'll see texts and links. Those are written in html. Pretty much everything else that a webpage can do requires javascript. For example, every time you enter information into a form and press a button on a web page, the page is using javascript or another web scripting language to take your information and do something with it.
To make large scale and irreversible changes to a file. This definition stems from the recursive
acronym MUNG: Mung Until No Good. PRonounced like "Lung".
See Munge, Address Munging
To imperfectly transform information. Frqeuently it rferes to the mxinig up of
lteters in the wrdos in a setnecne, lkie so. Pronounced "Munj" like "Lunge".
See Mung, Address Munging
A business is phishing if they try to make themselves look like a legitimate company when in fact they are not. The user of a phishing site or email, in thinking they are dealing with a real business, submit their personal information to the site.
Frequently phishers attempt to look like currently existing companies, and go as far as to copy the company logo onto fake sites and emails. This makes it even easier for us to recognize when a site is actually phishing.
See Spider
Unsolicited commercial email. Sometimes called by the acronym UCE by people who want to sound smart.
A spamhaus is an internet provider that allows spam to be sent from its system. The word spamhaus is of German origin.
A computer program specifically written to scan web pages for email addresses Those email addresses are recorded, and spam is sent to them. There are ways to avoid them. An easy and very effective way of avoiding spam bots is the us of an address munger like the one created here on AddressMunger.com.
See Spam Bot
The bot that the search engine runs to collect pages to make available for search. Sometimes just called a bot.
Any software that covertly gathers info about a user while he/she surfs and transmits the information to an individual or company that uses it for marketing or other purposes.
Intilaly adrdses mugning rfeererd to the mxiing of lteters or smyblos in an eamil adrdess, as in tihs snetecne. However it now commonly refers to any use of munging, ASCII, and JavaScript to hide your email address. Transparent mangling refers to any munging in which the text, in this case the email address, is perfectly visible. For example, this email address "this@email.address" is transparently mangled, though you can't tell by looking at it. The source code actually reads as "th is& #x40;e 09;ai
 8;.ad dre ss".
What you should never do when you get a spam email. You didn't subscribe, and they still have your email address, right?
See Spider
See Spider
See Spider
Sources: Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, The Jargon File, version 4.4.7