Up to now, we still see people displaying their email addresses in their blog posts. And these include columnists of major news sites which we find very disappointing.
The practice of displaying email addresses in web pages is an open invitation to spammers who use spambots which crawl on webpages to harvest anything that looks like an email address.
There are several methods to fight off spambots.
One method is to use an online contact form which obfuscates the recipient email address.
If you are using WordPress, there are a number of “contact form” plugins.
Here are two of those available in the WordPress community which we have been using in our websites:
- WP-Spamfree eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature which can easily be installed in two minutes or less.
- Contact Form 7 which allows you to design as many contact forms you want in your website. It also supports features like AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and file uploading.
With contact form plugins that can easily obfuscate email addresses, are you still displaying your email address on your site?
The more I look around the more it seems...
The role of internet service providers in curbing spams
Top 10 Worst Spam Service ISPs
Today, I posted an entry, Australia not in Top 10 worst spam origin countries, but home to #6 spammer.
The gist of my blog is that Australia has been able to stay away from the Top 10 list because of its strong spam laws.
But governments can only do so much in fighting spam. The real key to fighting spam is the private sector’s network of internet service providers. Unless ISP networks cooperate, the fight against spam will be a losing battle.
But will networks cooperate?
The daily updates of the independent spam-tracking organisation, the Spamhaus Project, show that the positions and ranking of the world’s worst spam service ISPs keep on changing. Last May 2009, even one of the largest ISPs in the United States was in this Top 10 list, and it was ranked #6 worst spam service ISP.
Here is a part of the Spamhaus Project report :
If corporate greed, it would of course be foolish to assume that these networks will give away the proverbial “goose that lays the golden egg”. At best, they may stop servicing spam business only when cost structure arising from loss of customer support or from government lock-down pressure will be greater than the profits they derive from servicing spammers.
If mismanagement, networks have to put plugs to holes in their operations including a regular monitoring and reporting of any unusual activities in their network. Even that would mean extra costs which many ISPs will try to avoid as much as they can.
You can read more about this in my blog, A Matter of Sharing.