I've found a solution that's more effective against spam than a top-notch spam filter, or a federal regulation, or a dozen multi-million dollar lawsuits from Microsoft. It is, plain and simply, not to list my email address in any mailto: or easily stolen text links.
Here's how. Instead of, say, typing my email address on my personal blog as sarahgilbert@domain.com, or providing a mailto: link behind my name, I write it like this: sarahgilbert @ domain.com, or sarahgilbert[at]domain[dot]com. It's amazingly simple. None of the email addresses I've protected in this manner receive spam. Absolutely zero.
Instead, I get great emails from real people who are interested in talking to me. Nothing else, ever.
Of course, I own my own web sites so I'm not worth "guessing" - i.e., every time I open my little-used @comcast.net or @hotmail.com accounts, there are dozens of unsolicited spam emails. But it's cheap to own your own website, about $8 per year is the going rate. Most registration packages include free email forwarding of as many as hundreds of email aliases. For $8 to $10 per year and a little subterfuge when you include your email address on web sites or in blog comment forms, you get: zero spam. It's a lot cheaper than software, not to mention fun and easy.
1. Yes Sarah, this is one way of protecting email ids. But there is another techy way of doing this. And since almost all websites/cms's use CSS these days, it is even easy.
Visit
http://ls-l.blogspot.com/2005/01/tips-for-all-fighting-spam.html
I got this tip from the CSS weblog.
Posted at 4:51AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Shashank Sharma