Spam Culture

[Melooon]

EDIT: I split this topic off from the E-mail Culture topics becouse I think its a really good discussion but I don't wanna derail the e-mail topic!
Here is the e-mail topic that this was split from: https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=717.msg6618#msg6618

The other thing is being careful how you put your email address on the site.

This is an interesting topic; we were drilled about this subject in web design class - "never ever ever put an e-mail on a website or you'll get spam", and that makes a lot of sense. However Id had exposed emails on sites for years now and Iv (almost) never gotten any spam..

I have a theory that spammers just don't actually crawl the web for emails anymore; they don't expect people to be posting un-obscured emails on personal sites anymore; or if they do, its just not worth their time to find them.. Its a bit like playing with fire, but at this moment in time I actually don't think putting an e-mail on a site is really an issue anymore (but its still a bad idea, don't do as I do!)

[Memory]

I have a theory that spammers just don't actually crawl the web for emails anymore; they don't expect people to be posting un-obscured emails on personal sites anymore; or if they do, its just not worth their time to find them.

I just think it's easier for them to just use one of the giant leaked databases like the recent Twitter leak, or to write spam to various addresses on known domains (for example "webmaster@libre.town" gets plenty of spam even though it does not even exist). More than just trying out e-mails that appear online; because by all means they might just be anyone, especially tech-savvy folk who are already hosting their own website, or journalists, fake e-mails, things falsely parsed as e-mails... The list goes on. The prime targets are the elderly, children, and those not well versed in the internet, and they won't have their emails anywhere.

[TheFrugalGamer]

I think you are both correct...I've also had my email address up on my website for a while now and the only spam I've gotten have been a few targeted emails asking if they could write stupid articles for me or perform SEO for my site. Clearly written by a human, but spam nonetheless.

My blog, on the other hand, gets TONS of spam, though Akismet makes it a bit easier to deal with. Most of them are clearly bots that are being programmed to solve CAPTCHA puzzles, and they're scarily good at it. They seem to be trying to use my comments form to test their accuracy, though I don't let any of them get through. Funny that the landscape has changed so much in recent years. I remember in the past using all sorts of obfuscation scripts in order to avoid the dreaded spam, but now it seems they're all targeting social media.

[Melooon]

Most of them are clearly bots that are being programmed to solve CAPTCHA puzzles

When this forum was first made I used a standard captcha and we got quite a bit of spam; then I switched over the the silly question it asks about what kind of animal is in the register icon; it works really well! Bots are great at figuring out things they understand, but if you do things even in a slightly unusual way they totally break!

Also those SEO emails, I think they might use our emails connected to the domain registration information? As far as I know everyone with a website gets them.

[HayleyMulch]

If you have an online store powered by a popular platform, then yep, spam is a thing. Sadly the contact form with my business email up on it gets spammed horrendously. So much so I even left a message saying you will be deleted and they still don't care lmaoooo. So that's one exception here. But I've made a handy dandy filter so thankfully I only see like 1 come through my main inbox every few weeks now.

[Memory]

Remember back when people were so paranoid about this that they used Flash to create a clickable email link within a small container? Then Flash became the biggest vulnerability on the internet.

I wasn't following the topic this was spawned off from, so apologies if anyone already said that. I just thought it was funny.

[wris]

Similar experiences to some of you! I've had publicly listed emails for a while, and it's had no noticable impact on the amount of robo-spam I get, just the occasional unsolicited "let me publish on your site" / "let us redesign your site" email from web design or content marketing companies.

It's worth it for the rare occasion that someone sends me a kind email.