Am I asking for more SPAM if I add E-mail addresses?

[MaineWeb]

My company's main domain is www.MainResource.com . We also have www.MainEResource.com and others. Here is my question: If we configure things so we can get E-mail addressed to @maineresource.com in addition to the @mainresource.com that we already use, are we going to get more spam???

I'm not sure if it is just having the address that opens you up to SPAM, or if the @mainEresource addresses would have to be published to get picked up.

[bhartzer]

It's not actually having the email addresses, it's whether or not you allow the spammers a way to get those email addresses. Sometimes the spammers guess your email address or send it to webmaster@yourdomain.com or something like that. Or, having your email listed on your website or in other places on the web will get your email address on a spam list.

[MaineWeb]

OK, that makes sense, thanks. I have been working so hard to get rid of all the SPAM I just wanted to be sure!

[Duncan Pollock]

I don't think you have any hope at all of avoiding spam if you give out your e-address. The spammers have sophisticated harvesting techniques that no amount of filtering or legislation is going to overcome any time soon -- if indeed ever at all.
But I think the more important question is: do you want people to contact you? That surely is the reason you have a website, isn't it?
Ergo, spam is one of the costs of doing business. You don't have to like it, but I'm far from convinced you can do anything about it -- expect keep hitting the delete key!

Duncan

[MaineWeb]

I know, you are right. I just can't help myself. :)

[marketershandbook.com]

Hi,
there is a way to avoid having your email adress harvested by the spammers.
It's very simple too.

Just have a mailto: link and in the link text put NOSPAM in the middle. I would think that that woul stop them. Unless they can actually take the email addresses from the source code (which is definately a possibility)

So far when I have done this, I haven't recieved 1 piece of spam.

[trsiyengar]

marketershandbook.com wrote:

Just have a mailto: link and in the link text put NOSPAM in the middle. I would think that that woul stop them. Unless they can actually take the email addresses from the source code (which is definately a possibility)

IMO, the spammers and spoofers have more modern and advanced tools to harvest every e-mail address they come across. It was one such tool that my son brought to my notice, that even putting with "NOSPAM" in between the link, they can surely have your mail address minus the nospam quote! Possibly this might reduce the spam mails but surely not a way to stop it in total.

[swstyles]

I see a lot of this going on lately name | @ | domain.com. Killing the mailto links on your site helps. It forces the user to manually type in your email address into their mail program.

I also use a javascript function to call the email address.

So the end user still sees the hyper link but the source code is showin something else.

[yugg]

There are several ways to hide your email address, some more effective than others. The simplest is to have a Contact Us page with an entry box for people to type their queries in. If the form is then processed by a server-side script (eg Php, Asp etc), there is no way the spammers can get the address.

If you need to display your email, then the spammers can get your email address from anywhere it is displayed on a website. But most of them use robots to pick it up - they don't usually have the time for a human to search for addresses. So hide it from the robots, and you're reasonably ok (the exception is those work-from-home schemes which suck people into a marketing scheme then tell them to trawl the internet for email addresses themselves).

But first, just using a mailto: link without showing the address in the link text is no good, because, yes, the robots do read the Html source code which, of course, shows the address in full.

One way is to use Javascript to display it. However robots may just read the html file as text, just looking for the mailto: keyword, so you need to jumble up the email address, not have it as a complete string. And in particular, break up the mailto: keyword which the robots search for.

This is the code from one of my own sites. This goes somewhere between the <head> tags in your page Html:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">
//<!--
em5 = "shoppingoffersalert.co.uk";
em1 = "<a href='mai";
em2 = "lto: ";
em3 = "customer-services";
em4 = "@";
//-->
</script>

and this goes in the the Html at the point where you want to display the email address:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">
//<!--
document.write( em1 + em2 + em3 + em4 + em5 + "'>");
document.write( em3 + em4 + em5 + "</a>");
//-->
</script>

The & #064; bit is the long code for the @ character (though no doubt some robots will look for that that also).

The spammers' robots won't dig the address out of that!

And by the way, I had to tick the "disable Html" in this post, as the forum system couldn't cope the javascript code above!

[fnarf999]

Originally Posted by swstyles

I see a lot of this going on lately name | @ | domain.com. Killing the mailto links on your site helps. It forces the user to manually type in your email address into their mail program.

What you have to understand is, the major spam gangs have an infinite capacity to send spam. Infinite means INFINITE, so it doesn't matter to them if, say, 99% of their email is never even delivered because the address is wrong. They have the capacity to email every likely combination at every domain. All of the usual tricks can be and are got around. Remember, if you can think of it, Alan Ralsky can think of it too. So you may think of something that works for a short time, but soon it too will fail.

This is why 90% of all email is spam, and why it will soon be 100%.