I just received an irate email from someone blaming me for all her spam because her email address appears on one of my sites in a directory.

I thought I would share part of my response because others may find it informative.

Just so you know, you did not have to submit your listing with your email address - it is not compulsory. We have the email address field because the directory began as group of agents referrring business to each other. On the internet, email is how things work. In most cases agents can take their phone numbers off their website and not lose any business. People using the web do not want to use the phone - they want to email.

Do you know how spammers get their email addresses to send out spam? It is not necessarily because you have your email address on our web page. The first place spammers spider is the domain registry company pages and they picked up your email address from there before it ever appeared on our site. Have you ever sent anyone an email? If you have, then your email has probably been picked up out of their email program by spyware and viruses and you are receiving spam and viruses as a result. In fact, that is where the bulk of your spam is coming from.

If you think that you are getting spam just because you had your email address on our website you are mistaken. It is a fact of life if you are going to be active in any way on the web.

I used to only show my email address on the web as a JPEG. I might start doing that again.

But if you are creating a hyperlink on that image they will still capture it. They scan source code.

There is a good way to do it, but it involves Javascript, and for me, I don't like relying to much on JS for certain things that might enable a potential client from not being able to see it.

I can post it here if you guys want it, otherwise I say just deal with the spam and keep tweaking your filter daily. You can get it down to filtering out most of everything.

-J

I agree, It doesn't matter what you do - if you are active on the net you will get spam.

I use http://www.onlymyemail.com to stop about 1000 a day before they reach my inbox. I never see it at all and that makes me happy

jpegs are a great way to stop spammers, BUT that forces legitimate contacts to type in your email address into their email program. That increases your chances that somebody will get the email address WRONG and your mail will never reach you.

This has been an on-going problem with my website, what I did was used a generic email address (info@) and removed all other email address. I also set my catch all account (the account that email addressed to my DOMAIN but not to a recognized account) to an email address that just receives spam.

This way, my main inbox doesn't get cluttered with spam and I am still able to have an easy-to-use email address for the people who want to contact me.

What other ideas do you guys have?

Here at our office, some of the agents got to fed up with the hundreds a day spam messages. So we asked our webmaster what to do, and they came up with a plan to implement on the server level. The used a program called SpamAssassin. It works splendidly well. All it does is scan your incoming email, and brand the subject line of potential spam. Then it goes to your inbox like normal. In our case, it is setup to rename the subject like to "*****SPAM*****" next to the original subject line. Then simply changed my Outlook to send all emails with that branding to a designated spam folder. Most actually just have it deleted straight out, but I like to scan it to make sure it doesn't have legit email. To the date, 7 months later I haven't had a single real email get screwed. I have had a few slip by the filter, but nothing near enough to get upset about. Perhaps that'll help?

I wish there was a definitive answer for stopping spam. Everything we have tried to date leaves alot to be desired and requires us to manually filter through the deleted spam anyway due to legit messages being deleted so what's the point

All the attempts at spider-proofing an email address on a website is probably a big waste of time. I really believe most of the spammers get your email address elsewhere.

I have a website that has been online for over a year and has been listed in all the search engines just as long. I use a unique email address on the site and do not use the email address anywhere else. I only get one or two spam emails a week from that address (no spam filter either). And those measely spams just started appearing recently and could just as easily be coming because the email address is sitting in a few other folks address book and not necessarily from the website.

I believe 99% of spam comes because you are active on the web and not because you have an email address on a website.

So, get a good filter (I use onlymyemail.com for the bulk of my spam filtering) and party on

To protect personal email address from spammers, I suggest our customers to set up individual email addresses for use when entering personal information at Web sites. For example, if a customer wants to buy something at online store, he or she can do so using a different email address, such as name-of-the-online-store@his-personal-domain.com. In the earlier days of the Internet, it was personal-name@online-store.com, now it is 0nline-store@personal-name.com. Note, how personality becomes more important in our modern informative society. It is now the person who controls emails instead of any company. Any message sent to that address is sent to the user's primary email account, but if the user notices lots of spam, he or she can delete the address and know exactly which company sold his or her personal information.
It's always a good idea to put a web contact form on the web site to substitute and hide email address which can be harvested from any web site by robots.