Thursday, April 14, 2005
Spam cure worse than the curse
I have an associate that believes spammers should be shot, literally! He runs a very busy mail server that sees just way too much spam. I'm not sure i'd be that draconian in dealing with spammers but nor would I do what I see happening on many websites.
You can reach me via sales@lorrex.com, not salesatlorrexdotcom. How does publishing your email in the aforementioned manner make it easy for potential customers to contact you? It doesn't! Does it slow the spammers down? Not really. If spammers really want to harvest email addresses they'll just come up with better algorithms to get them.
A better way to thwart email harvesting is to use use a feedback form. If you still want to publish your email address you can do it by using a graphical link to your form. One day I might even do that on my site.
Another way to deal with spam is to use a spam filter. That's what I do and it seems to work fairly well.
Now, who's got the bullets?
