You can e-mail me at donald.briggs@comcast.net
(NOTE: Don’t really send email to this address. Use the link at the top.)
Comcast gave me this e-mail address when signing up–which is fine, I suppose, but I’ll never use it. So I’m sticking it up here to see how fast the spammers start hitting it. (Actually, I already received 5 spams, which is vaguely frightening.)
Remember, spammers: that’s donald.briggs@comcast.net. And I never check the account, so you won’t get a penny or hit from me.
I never quite understood that. I see folks putting up their email adress in the strangest ways to avoid what you’re talking about. How does that work anyway? Care to elaborate? Should i take my email link off my weblog?
Comment by ookwelbekendalsemc | 6 November 2007
The risk it that spammers use “robots” to read the text off a webpage and find e-mail addresses that way. The robots might look for a mailto: link or any text in the format xxxx@xxx.com.
Now I’m curious to how much spam you normally receive.
As you’ve noticed, people change the format of the address to try to hide it from robots. I prefer to have people use a form (as seen in the e-mail link) to further reduce the risk. Some spammers get clever, and undoubtedly there are robots who look for some minor alterations (like xxxx at xxx.com)
Incidentally, my liquideggproduct.com e-mail receives zero spam.
Comment by Donnie | 6 November 2007
Well, i use this free account from yahoo. I do receive spam on it, and the ammount varies. But it has a pretty good spam filter which puts it all in a seperate spam folder.
Comment by ookwelbekendalsemc | 6 November 2007
Btw, how do you get this contact form on your weblog? Do you have a paid for wordpress account? Can i have it on a free wordpress account?
Comment by ookwelbekendalsemc | 6 November 2007
You could post your email address as a graphic file. I doubt the robots will take the time to OCR it.
Comment by Allen | 6 November 2007
Never understood SPAM. My yahoo also does a pretty good job of filtering stuff out. eventually I’m going to make it so that only people on my list can email me.
Comment by annie | 7 November 2007
@ookwelbekendalsemc: If you don’t have spam problems, you may not even worry about this.
The widget is called cforms. It’s on wordpress.org, so I’d imagine you’d be able to use it.
@Allen: Actually, that’s a great idea.
@Annie: But what if Robert Redford wants to e-mail you for some reason? Then it could never get to you!
Comment by Donnie | 7 November 2007
Some e-mails send back a challenge email requiring you to fill out a form. Problem is, no one is likely to want to go through that hassle or automated e-mails like bank and credit card statements wouldn’t be able to handle that causing you to lose legitimate mail.
Comment by Allen | 7 November 2007
Robert Redford has my private line.
Comment by annie | 7 November 2007
@Allen: I got one of those once and didn’t bother. E-mail’s a pain anyway, so I don’t care about losing legitimate e-mail
@Annie: Oh, so you’ve heard of him. Good. He must be an actor, ’cause he’s in some movie coming out Friday. I really don’t know anything about him.
Comment by Donnie | 8 November 2007