online for a mortgage, the owner of this site may have made a deal with a spammer to sell the address. These are considered the best emails by spammers, because they are fresh and the user has just signed up for a product or service that often is marketed by spam. Legality In many jurisdictions there are anti-spam laws in place that restrict the harvesting or use of email addresses. In Australia, the creation or use of email-address harvesting programs (address harvesting software) is illegal, according to the 2003 anti-spam legislation, only if it is intended to use the email-address harvesting programs to send unsolicited commercial email. The legislation is intended to prohibit emails with 'an Australian connection' - spam originating in Australia being sent elsewhere, and spam being sent to an Australian address. New Zealand has similar restrictions contained in its Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. In The United States of America, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 made it illegal to initiate commercial email to a recipient where the email address of the recipient was obtained by: Using an automated means that generates possible electronic mail addresses by combining names, letters, or numbers into numerous permutations. Using an automated means to extract electronic mail addresses from an Internet website or proprietary online service operated by another person, and such website or online service included, at the time the address was obtained, a notice stating that the operator of such website or online service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages. Furthermore, website operators may not distribute their legitimately collected lists. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires that operators of web sites and online services should include a notice that the site or service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses, maintained by such website or online service, to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages. Countermeasures Address munging Address munging—e.g., changing "bob@example.com" to "bob at example dot com"—is a common technique to make harvesting email addresses more difficult. Though relatively easy to overcome—see, e.g., this Google search—it is still effective. It is somewhat inconvenient to users, who must examine the address and manually correct it. Images Using images to display part or all of