Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 16:19:30 -0800
From: "Grant Green"
Subject: [CB] Spam prevention
For anyone interested in avoiding spam:
You may recall that I changed my main email address around the
beginning of the year, in order to cut down on the amount of spam I
receive. The new address is posted on the internet (see
http://www.contrabass.com/pages/contrabass_contact.html),
using Escramble (see
http://innerpeace.org/escrambler.shtml)
to prevent it being picked up by spiders or bots. To date, the new
address has collected less than 20 spam messages (I deleted a few
before it occurred to me that I should do a count) over the 6+ months
I've been using it. In contrast, the old address continues to receive
about 2MB of spam per day (and that's
after
a fair amount of filtering).
Reading email is much more pleasant now :-)
What about the 20 spam messages? Some spammers use programs that
methodically try random words or combinations of characters as user
IDs. Thus, you can receive spam even if you've never told anyone your
email address. However, I think most of them figure out that this is
only practical for major domains like aol.com, hotmail.com, etc., that
have millions of users. If they send 45 million randomly-addressed
spams to contrabass.com, there's no way to reach more than one user, so
it only clogs their own bandwidth.
The other measure I've taken is to use yahoo.com disposable
email addresses for product or website registrations. You can set up an
unlimited number of disposable accounts, even one for each website or
product you register, and simply drop the address if it starts to
receive spam.
Anyway, I believe the experiment was a success :-)
Grant
--
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Grant Green Contrabass.com
Sarrusophones & contrabass winds
**NOTE NEW ADDRESS**
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Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 18:34:37 -0600
From: Jim Quist
Subject: Re: [CB] Spam prevention
This idea has worked for me as well, here's another script
generator that encrypts your address:
I've received no spam in the past year on the address I have
encrypted.
Lucky me.
Jim
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Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 16:54:49 -0800
From: "Chuck Guzis"
Subject: Re: [CB] Spam prevention
On 11/30/2004, Grant Green wrote:
>For anyone interested in avoiding spam:
I've been using my own JavaScript email link disguiser for some
time on my own web site and cover that 1% of browsers without JS
enabled by placing a GIF of the email address on the same page.
Except for someone using an old version of Lynx, that should pretty
much cover everyone.
But it's just a matter of time before the spam bots start wising
up to the JS tricks.
The ultimate in spam protection, it seems to me, is with
server-side (cgi) emailing. From a user's point of view, I hate
the blamed things because I'm forced to fill in the POST form instead
of using my own email client. But they're very effective in
eliminating spam because your email address is never exposed. But
it cuts both ways as they also give the sender almost complete (except
for an IP address) anonymity.
Cheers,
Chuck
***End of Contrabass Digest***