ABQweb Blog (ABQweBlog?)

As a web designer, web host and businessperson, I have A LOT of email addresses. I have EVEN MORE web pages that list one or more of my email addresses, including domain registries that list me as the owner of dozens of domain names. Lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s any way to protect my addresses from spammers, scammers, and robots.

I already encode the email addresses on the sites I create, which is SUPPOSED to stop the robots. I’ve even taught some of my customers how to do it, although I’m not sure how much good it does if you try to change it after posting pages with “mailto” in them. Once the spammers have you, they definitely don’t let go.

I also use a version of “formmail” on the sites I host that encodes the “recipient” field so  it doesn’t contain an email address. Of course, some spammers just try to “break” the forms by submitting them hundreds of times with garbage information. Not fun, but if it doesn’t break, I can almost live with that.

In some extreme cases, I’ve encoded the actual header for the form so the word “formmail” doesn’t even appear on any pages. It also seems to help, but the downside is that it becomes more difficult to identify (and update) pages with forms. Nothing is easy.

Finally, I’ve signed up many of my addresses (and quite a few of my customers’ addresses) to run through Postini for additional spam filtering. When I first signed up for Postini, I saw an amazing decrease in the number of spams I received. Instead of seeing 2000+ messages every Monday morning, I only saw 100. No wonder Google bought them!

I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and it seemed to be working pretty well, but something has changed in the past six months or so. Postini is grabbing thousands of messages every few days and hundreds are getting through each day. The “froms” are random, the subjects change slightly with every message, and no spam “campaign” seems to last more than a few days.

Just when Postini seems to learn how to stop it, it changes. White lists are practically worthless, as messages appear to come from people you know or even from yourself! I’ve stopped adding people to my white lists because it just means that all the spam pretending to be from them gets through automatically.

Is there anything that can be done short of changing your email address every month or two? I’m finding it hard to be optimistic, but I’m open to suggestions. If you’ve tried something and it’s working, let me (and everyone else who reads this blog) know about it. The spammers are working hard to beat us, but maybe we can work together to beat them. At least I hope so.