Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Tens of thousands of spam

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam. Eventually I got fed up of it. 20,000 spam messages in the last 48 hours, and this is getting pretty common. I use gmail, which has an excellent spam filter, so I only get to see a fraction of these that bleed through to my inbox, but a fraction of 10,000 a day is still too much. I decided to take some action. The vast majority of my spam comes from the NTGateway.com address. Spam robots simply affix any automated name to NTGateway.com, and my ISP sends it all to me. So I have discontinued the use of blog@ntgateway.com as my blog email address, and have diverted all ntgateway.com mail to another address which I will only occasionally check. Please send any future blog-related emails to my Duke address (goodacre at duke dot edu).
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2 comments:

  1. J. P. van de Giessen14 December 2006 at 14:29

    I also advice to change your email in top of the blog into an image with you email. Spammers are also scanning text with "at", "dot" and "com".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous14 December 2006 at 22:32

    "J.P." is right, Mark.

    What happened, in all likelihood, is that any mail sent to your NT Gateway domain was automatically forwarded to your Gmail account.

    However, you should be able to change the settings VERY easily so that only mail directed to a SPECIFIC account will be forwarded to your Gmail account. This is the best way to handle this.

    If you really, truly want to minimize your spam, use something like "mark.goodacre@ntgateway.com". There is no way that you will receive so much junk using this formatting. Trust me, I know from personal experience -- and I've had a blog before RSS existed (and an e-newsletter before there was a graphical web).

    When you post it on your site, say: "mark d-t goodacre att ntgateway d-t c-m". This should help reduce your spam to near zero.

    ReplyDelete