Munging is a technique used to prevent spam by changing your email address to be unrecognizable by spam bots. It is important to follow rules and not use someone else’s email address. Munging can be controversial and may be banned on certain websites. It can also be used to protect children’s email addresses from predators.
Munging is a term used on the Internet, which helps eliminate certain uses of your email on sites where your email address can be harvested and used to spam you, often from programs called spam bots. The practice means that you change your email address to be invalid or not appear as an email address by these bots. You can pronounce the word in two ways, such as rhyming with the word lunging or with a hard g, such as in the word “tra.” The word mung is an acronym that stands for “mash until it’s good.” But tech speak or nerdic also use the term munge as a verb, which means to alter something so that it cannot be recognized.
Typical munging might happen over a chat or listserve, but it shouldn’t happen when you expect an automated business like an Internet store to get back to you about a question or purchase. If you want to give someone your e-mail address in a simple way, write something like: “You can contact me at Rob at dot net server”. Most people might read this to understand that [email protected] was the actual email address provided. Others put dashes between each letter or follow .net, .org or .com with a .no-spam. A spambot scan for email addresses usually takes the whole address and when you try to send spam email to the address, it won’t be able to since it doesn’t exist.
There are a few rules about munging that you should be aware of. You should never change an address so that it actually lists someone else’s real address. This is a fraudulent and very bad form. Additionally, you may want to look into other ways to protect your email account from spam, such as using spam blockers and the like. If many people employ mung tactics, it’s pretty sure that hackers will find a way to create programs that interpret typical mung addresses.
There are some who strongly oppose this practice. Usually these topics come from companies that use spambots to get email addresses. Likewise, if you join an internet group of any kind, they may ban the practice, especially on the membership form. You should read all FAQs, terms and agreements to make sure munging is not prohibited on a site you wish to join.
In other cases, however, munging may just be a way to fight spam and discourage the use of your email address distributed among numerous advertisers. Teaching children to milk and to recognize it can be a great idea, especially on children’s sites. While these are technically monitored, sending an email in a chat means it could be picked up and used by predators. Milking it might make it a little more difficult. Technically, though, your child shouldn’t be giving out email addresses to strangers anyway.
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