BEWARE THEY ARE VERY VERY SOPHISTICATED. When I posted the Google Apps: An Office And Email Solution Every Company Should Use 2 days ago I did not think that spam would be a problem. Considering that I average at the moment only 80 users per day I never thought that this would affect me. Well I would just like to say that within those 2 days spam bots have gotten a hold of my email address and I have received and influx of spam emails. If I did not have the protection of the Gmail/Google Apps spam filter this of course would be a huge problem and it would annoy the hell out of me. I did a little research and I suggest that if you are ever going to post your email address somewhere do so under either a secondary address or replace the ‘@’ symbol with ‘[at]’. I recently discovered that with Google Apps has a feature that lets you assign email ‘Nicknames’ (nickname@yourDomain.com) that are an extension of your email address. If a nickname is getting too many email then all you have to do is create a new one and remove the old one.
Tom said,
Spam is inevitable I think. Just as you meantion replacing the @ with [at] is most certainly already recognized by scraper type software that scans the web searching for email addresses. It certainly is possible consider any “emailname[any variable character]domain.com” to be saved as “emailname@domain.com”. Even if the software isn’t always 100% in determining if it is a legit email account, it doesn’t cost the spammers to attempt it.
Makes me wonder if its possible to embed and link-to insanely long massive lists of bogus email addresses with the intention of spamming spammers with false emails. Or furthermore….. target a specific domain name’s email server you don’t like by creating a list of a few hundred thousand false emails using their domain extension for spammers to scrape.
Hmmm… I see no solution to spam other than possibily those obnoxious validator systems.
Anyway…what was my point? oh yeah… first comment!!!
Tom
admin said,
Well I guess you are right, spam is here to stay but there are definitely things that can be don’t to not only protect yourself from spammers, but also protect your email server from being overloaded. I had actually not thought about people trying to crash my email server, but I am at least protected in part by what ever measures Google has put into place to protect the Gmail servers. Another reason Google Apps is a great utility. Secondly I have 2 lays of spam filtering, one through Google Apps and the other through an outlook plugin I am currently using. But they still seem to be getting through due to me posting my email address on this blog a while ago. There is another option that I can think of and that is to use an image with your email address in it. This should significantly stem the about of spam. Check out whois.sc for an example of what I mean. When you look up a domain, the owners email addresses are in this format to protect them against spammers.
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