You're not going to like this. But you can't. Not 100%, anyway. I mean - imagine you give your email to nobody. You don't post in any forums. You don't have a website. Not a sausage. So some fool in Minneapolis, Miami or Mozabique just fires off 2 million random dictionary fires at your isp. Cool eh? No. But this is a waste of their time and effort - it's much easier to just grab the names off the net. So, let's see if we can stop 99%.
The first thing to mention is that it may be a little late. It would be better to start with a new email address. If you really can't try to slow it down, anyway. I think if it was bad enough and I had an address at my own domain and a professional web design (which I would not want to change), I'd just add another pop3 account and keep checking my old account during the changeover. But, that's up to you. I'm pretending it's a new address, anyway.
The number one way that spammers will get your email address is through crawling webpages. Imagine a big rake that's pulled through the 'net. And your email address is the size of a log. You're in trouble. So, what do you do? Don't put your email address ANYWHERE on the 'net.
If you need it for business, or even personal and you want a point of contact, then you need it out there. One problem is that when you register a domain name, you need an official contact email address. Yeah, they even pilfer the registry. So, set up one address just for spam - like dan@geektech.com. That's a good one. Sorry, these guys house spammers (and pornography and 'mens health' pills etc), so I just had to get them in. On a sidenote, I cannot believe that men are so dumb - they must be for these guys to still be in business. Okay, okay - I'm a man too. Just not (as) dumb.
So, the best tine you can do is to put your email address on an image, like this:
Yup, that's an image, not text. Try and get that with a crawler! I just put the text on the page when I was writing it, printed the screen, made a little image and posted my screen print on top in the right place - you can too. Cool.
And if you do go to this trouble, don't type your 'real' email address into ANY sites, use your free 'spam' address. And you know which one to use when you post on the forums..eh?
Ok, that's it for now - more of a hit at the spammers than anything useful, but I'll come back here and talk about Flash links, so we can click on them! (Note: if you intend to do this before I get back, please don't foget to remove any unrequired 'URL's used in the movie, otherwise it'll be a waste of time. : )
Spam sucks, spammers are suckers. *Gone*
spam_killer
Article #005
24/04/2004
Oh, re Geektech - here's the address and telephone number of a really serious spammer: > GeekTech Inc., 155 5th Ave South, Suite 500, Minneapolis, MN 55401, US, 612-617-0117. So, if you found my highly ranked pages with a search for them - there ya go! Give Dan a call, I'm sure he'd love to hear from you and deal with your complaints.
And when I searched the FAQ on their hosting site for 'spam". Hey surprise - no results!
Sites Geektech own:
admin@geektech.com