Ryanware

Okay, I don’t really have 234 tips about stopping email spam, but here’s one that should help:

Stop posting your email address visibly on the internet. Spammers run bots (computer programs) that run around the internet looking for email addresses. When they find one, they add it to their database. Eventually it gets sold to lots of other spammers and you are flooded with spam.

Most people attempt to get around this by obfuscating their email address by typing it like this:

email at domain dot com

But this is just as ridiculous as typing email@domain.com. In fact, if you’re going to try to thwart the spammers by typing spaces, “at,” and “dot,” you’re only making harder for the real people you want to email you. Might as well type out the whole thing.

Why? Regular Expressions. What are regular expressions? To put it simply, they’re magical. For more in depth (and real) info check out the wikipedia article on regular expressions.

This is an extremely simple regular expression, but it matches both “email@domain.com” and “email at domain dot com”:

(.*) ?(@|at) ?(.*) ?(.|dot) ?(.*)

You can pretty much guarantee that spammers have got much more sophisticated regular expressions than this simple one. Basically, if any popular email-obfuscating pattern exists out there, they know about it and are looking for it.

Stop posting your email address online, obfuscated or otherwise! Keep it hidden, keep it away from spammers.

P.S. Thankfully, nearly all blogging platforms (including wordpress, which I use) keep user’s email addresses confidential so they can’t get picked up by spammers.

Akismet has just released version 2.0 of their beloved spam filter for WordPress.

Akismet has caught 16,560 spam for you since you first installed it.

Thank you, Aksimet!

Compare this to my stats back in October! I really think I would go insane without this plugin.

I have accounts at multiple banks and one credit union. At one bank I signed up for their online statements. It works great! It’s much easier to get PDFs instead of paper mail that I’ll save, but may never look at. The credit union claims to have “E-Statements,” so I signed up (free, of course). Have I got any actual statements? No, but I’ve gotten promotional emails for their other products and services. Lame. “Hey sign up for our online statements that’s really just spam!” I don’t remember seeing any small print or check boxes asking if I was okay with spam, but apparently it was there somewhere. Or they’re just plain deceptive.