It’s not about Ashton Kutcher. It’s all about email identity theft. Every time your personal or professional email address goes on a press release, e-mail promotion, article or marketing piece, it’s been jettisoned into cyberspace – and it’s ripe for the taking.

According to spoof/spam expert, Justin LeClair of Evolve Systems, www.evolve-systems.com, “Spammers will brute-check Google for email addresses and when they find one that’s out there a lot, they’ll use it to spoof.” Even more scarey, you won’t even know it’s happening – unless you’re getting bizarre email bounce-backs you never sent in the first place.

Spoofing is simply using a pirated or forged email address to blast out spam to millions of recipients – seemingly from someplace (your email address) other than the actual spam source. Spoofing can get you blacklisted. It makes spoofer/spammers a lot of jing - five cents for every click on a spam link times thousands of clicks.

More bad news: once your email address is out; there’s nothing you can do about it – except assume an entirely new email identity in a distant cyberspace millions of light years away. The good news: you can deter spoofers. LeClair suggests that you “use a different email address for publicly published media, so you don’t end up getting your personal or professional email address bombed”, for example:  info@helpimbeingspoofed.net.