[Web4lib] anti-spam email adress

[Blake Carver]

Take a look at what SUNY Buffalo does in their phone book, the use a
combination of forms and pages that I think do a good job of displaying
human readable addresses and hiding the addresses. They have an amazing web
team there.

The only way to gaurentee that your addresses won't get spammed is to keep
them off of web sites completely. Using a "contact us" form does the job
fine. My experience has shown that's a good solution. That doesn't stop
dictionary attacks, but at least your email address doesn't get sold (and
resold, and resold...).

If you recieve any spam it'll never stop, it'll only get worse. If you put
your email address in any form on any public web page you will get spam. If
you send email to a list, you'll get spam. If you own your domain and have a
"catch all" account you'll probably get spam. All spam filters fail
sometimes, and they all come at a cost.

I don't normally diagree with Thomas Dowling but... he wrote "get a good
spam filter and don't worry about it"

I think we've moved way beyond "not worrying about it" now. Spammers are
completely out of control, we (sysadmins) waste an unbelivable amount of
time and resources (server, time, moeny) defending against them. I don't
just mean email (managing spamassin, tuning mail servers) but blog spammers
as well (mod_security tuning, adding more ram to cope with load). For those
of us who must "worry about it" just adding a good spam filter is only the
beginning.


-Blake, bitter from dealing with too many spammers