Related Posts

Contact addresses and spam

One of the challenges anyone doing business on the internet faces is how to provide contact information so that potential customers can reach you in a form that spammers can’t easily abuse. Contact forms are the classic method, but they can (and are) abused by spammers. We decided to try something different. About 2 months ago, we started using rotating contact addresses. Every day a new address is deployed on the contact form on our website. Each address is valid for a fixed period of time, and is then retired.
This seems to be working well for us. Spammers are harvesting the email addresses, but because they are only valid for a fixed period of time, the amount of spam in my mailbox is not overwhelming. I am spending less time searching for sales mails through spam. An interesting side effect is I can actually see who is harvesting addresses and spamming.
It’s not perfect, I’m still getting spam to that address. But it’s spam at a level where I’m not losing real mail.

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New Blog Design

After a little more than two years and 500 posts we thought it was time for a redesign of the Word to the Wise blog.
While we were cleaning up the design we also fixed some functionality that was broken and added some new features:

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Light blogging through 2009

There will be some light blogging here through the end of the year. We are headed out for our first vacation in years next week, then will be spending some time with family. I will be blogging before we leave and will try to get some posts written to trickle out while I’m gone.
I hope everyone has a happy and relaxed holiday season. I am looking forward to resting, recharging and returning ready to take on 2009.

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