Readers' Comments

Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 15 June 2001

Note: the comments below are the unabridged submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.



From: Russell Brown
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: Cheers

Thanks for the mention this morning!

It wasn't so much that I was spammed - I'm realistic
about that - but that the address was harvested by a
customer of my own ISP scanning the ISP's
homepages, within four days of exposure.

It was about as blatant as it gets and I appreciated the
admirably swift and decisive response from Ihug's
abuse people.

I didn't expect Paul to write about it quite so soon, but
having done his job for five years, I know that there are
some mornings when you just plain need a story.

And, hell yes, I heartily appreciate the traffic the story is
generating. It's given us our biggest day yet at
www.mediawatch.co.nz and I hope the log just gets
longer.

PS: Yeah, we'll get you on  one day.




From: Camryn Brown
For : The Editor (for publication)
Subj: Use mailto: tags without fear!

I use mailto: tags on my .com site, but I'm not worried
about spammers. In fact, these days I get no spam at
all.... why? Partly because I've laid a trap on my site.

In short, I have a link on every page that leads into a
never ending spiral of pages crammed with mailto: tags
containing fake email addresses and links to more such
pages.

It makes sure the spambots choke (and ruin) their databases
with millions of fake email addresses everytime they visit
my site.

The more people that have these the better, so check this
site out to find out more: http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/

Of course, the spammers will stop falling for this trick
one day, but it works well at the moment!

Of course, you should also ensure all of your pages with
mailto: tags are protected by the Robot Exclusion
Protocol... wpoison only gets the extra bad spammers that
ignore the protocol.

Now Have Your Say