[Web4lib] Mailto: links that can't be harvested by spambots?

Jonathan Bloy JBloy at edgewood.edu
Mon Feb 19 15:00:12 EST 2007


Bill Drew wrote: 
> This whole discussion is a bit disturbing to me.  Just put
> your e-mail adress there.  Bite the bullet and use a good
> spam filtering package.  Deal with it like the rest of us
> do by being as accessible as possible.

Excellent advice.  The thing is, we can attempt to protect our email
addresses to the Nth degree but we will still get spam.

My personal email address (on my own domain) has never been posted
anywhere.  I use it only for friends and family.  About a year ago, it
started to get incredible amounts of junk mail.  I can only assume that
one of my friends caught a virus/trojan on their computer that harvested
my email from their address book.

Dictionary attacks, where spammers send combinations of usernames to
specific domains (especially larger ones) are also common.

If you have an email address, spam will find you eventually.

--
Jonathan Bloy
Web Services Librarian
Edgewood College
Madison, Wisconsin
http://library.edgewood.edu


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