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 I'll show you mine if you show me yours
Author: K.Yee   (21 Nov 04 5:26pm)
Here's an idea that just occured to me. Instead of announcing your e-mail address on every page, link to a contact page. Your contact page doesn't reveal your e-mail address; instead, it asks the reader to enter their e-mail address into a form. Then your site sends them your e-mail address.

If everyone started doing this, then spammers could start to automate the process of filling out these forms. To prevent that from working, the sites that use this technique could submit the requesters' addresses to a central blacklist for checking. Requesting addresses at known spammer domains would be rejected. To take care of addresses at free e-mail domains like Hotmail, the blacklist would keep track of how many requests came from the same address. Too many requests in a short period of time would blacklist the address, and then everyone's forms would stop responding to that address. Spammers would be forced to resort to constantly registering new domains or constantly creating new accounts on free e-mail services, both of which are fairly expensive and time-consuming procedures.

(Spammers do have to keep moving around now, but currently they only have to move after sending each batch of spam. The scheme i'm proposing forces them to move once for every few addresses they collect, which i think would be much more expensive for them and obstruct them before they can send hardly any spam.)

What do you think?
 
 Re: I'll show you mine if you show me yours
Author: C.Kruslicky   (21 Nov 04 8:28pm)
Personally I'd think if you're going through the trouble to make a fill-out form anyway, just make that the method people to use to contact you. Spammers may fill it out, but that would be a manual process if you write your own, unique page (rather than downloading something like the famous formmail.)

As an added benefit, you've not actually given out your email address at all unless you want to reply to their submission.



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