Many of us have been in this situation: you want to post your email address on your website so that people can read it, click a link, and get in touch with you. You're worried about displaying your email as a regular link, though, because bots will index it and start sending you spam. If you want to post your email address on a website so that it's readable by humans, but obfuscated from any bots trying to harvest it, take a look at The Enkoder.
The Enkoder is a quick web form (and a Mac desktop app!) that takes your email address and the link text you want to use, and spits out some encrypted JavaScript that you can put on the web. It's provided free-of-charge by Dan Benjamin and HiveLogic.com. The Mac version runs straight from your machine and remembers previous encodings.
When it comes to dealing with blog spam, there is no shortage of tools. Blogger comes with a built-in Google crafted tool, WordPress has Akismet (and Akismet is also available for Movable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine and tons of others), Defensio and others, Drupal has Mollom, and so on. Now Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, has released their own open source anti-spam tool for bloggers.
TypePad AntiSpam is the product of the antispam technology Six Apart has been using in their TypePad hosted blogs since May 2007. Now the service, which is in beta, is available to anyone, open source, and free -- regardless of how large your site is or how many comments you receive. Akismet, the service this is most akin to, is free for personal use but starts at $5 a month for anyone making more than $500 a month off their blog.
TypePad AntiSpam is available as a plugin for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5 and Movable Type 3.3 and up. Six Apart says they plan to support other platforms with plugins soon, but the API is available for anyone who wants to roll their own.
We just installed TypePad AntiSpam on one of our WordPress blogs (which was running Akismet) and we'll post our thoughts in comparing the services in the weeks to come.
Check the junk folder of your email service, and we're guessing you'll find hundreds of messages offering to enhance various body parts, decrease others, or ask for your help withdrawing large sums of money from a bank account. But what if you're simply misreading all of these messages? What if you're the one with the dirty mind, not the marketers?
Yeah, we're pretty sure that's not the case, but artist Janet Nelson is definitely onto something with her Innocent Spam series. She's taken actual subject lines from junk email messages and turned them into cute comic images, with none of the innuedo attached. For example, "oh man, he is ridiculously huge" could refer to anything, right? Why not a big dog? And just because you think of something else when you hear the word "Willy" doesn't mean it has to be dirty.
You can buy Nelson's work on a T-shirt or mug. Or you can just check out the comics on her website for free.
30 fateful years have passed since what is believed to be the first piece of spam has defiled the inboxes of unwitting victims. Since then things have gotten much worse, with Internet scams at an all time high and spam comprising up to 90% of all email.
Gary Thuerk, the only soul that can lay claim to the title "Father of Spam," is the man who started it all, even if he's not to blame for the monstrosity that all of this has evolved into. The enlightening moment in his mind was this: "It's too much work to send everyone an e-mail," ... "So we'll send one e-mail to everyone." And thus the beast was born.
His email inviting people to come see a product presentation of the DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY, which was written in all caps (setting the standard for years to come), was met with a very negative reaction foreshadowing how we still feel today about unsolicited emails. Interestingly enough, the email generated about $12 million in sales for Thuerk, which is probably why spam is still filling the inboxes of young and old alike: it works.
Looking for a way to post your email address online, but don't relish the idea of spambots picking up your address and sending you email ads for Viagra and anatomical enhancement pills? ReCAPTCHA Mailhide provides a simple tool for obscuring your email address.
All you have to do is enter your email address (and hope that the folks behind Mailhide aren't doing anything nefarious with it), and reCAPTCHA Mailhide will spit out a URL and some HTML code. Both take you to a page where you have to solve a CAPTCHA test like the one shown above to reveal an email address.
You can either provide a hyperlink to the URL, or embed the HTML code in your page. If you go the HTML route, visitors to your website will see a partial email address that looks something like b...@downloadsquad.com. When they click on the "..." a window will pop up asking them to solve the CAPTCHA. In other words, people don't have to leave your web site to get your email address. They just have to be able to decipher hard-to-read text.
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Ever signed up for an email or forum account, and been required to enter in a group of characters? That's a CAPTCHA system.
Folks are calling this hack the most sophisticated they have seen to date. Whereas cracking Windows Live Mail CAPTCHA required one compromised host, cracking Gmail took the combined efforts of two hosts. And because of Gmail's more sophisticated CAPTCHA system, only one in five breaking requests succeed.
While one in five doesn't sound like much, keep in mind that Spambots are constantly working at registering hundreds of email addresses at a time, 24/7. These Spambots can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
Oh, wait, that's another bot we're thinking of...
So for all the spammer's effort, what are they getting in return?
They gain access to Google's wide portfolio of services
They gain an address whose domain is highly unlikely to be blacklisted, helping them defeat one aspect of anti-spam defenses.
Gmail also has the benefit of being free to use.
Because Gmail has millions of users, it makes the spammers harder to track.
It might be time to invest in that underground bunker you've had your eye on.
How often have you found yourself with a can of Spam and no good recipe for Spam Breakfast Burritos, Spam Swiss Pie, or Spam Hashbrown Bake? It happens to us all the time. And while we could go search any of the thousands of recipe sites that populate the internet, Google's decided to make it easy to find all your Spam-related recipes in one place: your Gmail box box.
Now, we're well aware that the fine folks at Hormel don't approve of the practice of calling junk email messages "Spam." But since that's pretty much what everyone calls them, Google's making the best of a bad situation.
You see, there's a little space above the Gmail toolbar that Google typically uses to share "web clips." Typically web clips are links to news headlines and blog posts. You know, useful stuff. But the last thing you're usually looking for in your Spam filter are useful links. So Google had a choice: eliminate the space when you're viewing your spam filter or have a little fun. The Gmail team chose the latter.
So you've got a a web site, and you want to let people get in touch with you. But you know if you list your email address on that web page you're likely to get dozens of new messages every day asking if you'd like various parts of your anatomy enlarged. While you could use a service like Contactify to add a contact box to your site, there's also a much simpler solution: Just embed your email address in an image file so that screen scraping tools won't recognize it.
Creating an image with your email address isn't that difficult. Most basic image editing applications will let you embed text in a picture file. But Spam Proof eMail Generator makes things even easier. You don't have to download any application to your desktop. You can select from a group of fonts, colors, and text sizes. And you don't even need to host your image online. The generator will create an image for you and give you then give you an embed code and an image link.
Gmail users should take note that Google will disable accounts (for about 24 hours) if you send an e-mail to more than 500 recipients via the web interface, or 100 recipients via POP/IMAP. Also, if you send e-mail to too many undeliverable addresses, prepare to face the Google hammer.
Gmail takes these measures in an attempt to keep spammers off of their system. Sending bulk e-mail or sending to many addresses that don't accept your e-mail are telltale signs of spamming activity.
If you need to communicate with the same set of people often, Google recommends using their Google Groups service to create discussions, webpages, and even share files. If you run a server, you could utilize a listserver (so you can send an e-mail to one e-mail address to make Gmail happy, and then the listserver would send the message to all the members of that listserver).
You know those annoying "please enter the code" requests you see when signing up for online services, leaving blog posts, or otherwise trying to prove that you're human and not a machine? Yeah, it turns out that the machines are getting pretty good at reading them too.
The basic idea behind the CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart is that computers can't read text if its hidden in an image file. But a Russian researcher claims that he received word that there was an automated CAPTCHA detection system floating around in the wild. So he decided to build his own and managed to create a system which he claims has a 35% accuracy rate.
The claim has some credence, since a Yahoo! spokesperson tells TMCnet that the company is aware of attempts to hack the CAPTCHA system and is working on improvements. In the meantime, if this thing catches on there's a chance you'll see a lot more junk mail letting you know about an opportunity to make $1,000,000 or enlarge certain body parts coming from Yahoo! Mail accounts and other free email services. While the CAPTCHA system was originally developed for Yahoo!, it is now widely used by other services and we're going to go out on a limb and say that if Yahoo!'s implementation of CAPTCHA can be hacked, we'll probably be seeing other sites hacked soon as well.
We suppose Yahoo! can always just make their CAPTCHAs harder to read. Or you know, impossible to read.
You know those few thousand junk emails you've got sitting in your spam folder? Odds are they're only eating up a few megabytes on your server (we just deleted 2968 and freed up a whopping 8MB), but what would that mean if you multiplied that number by all the email accounts in the world?
The folks at Pingdom did a rough calculation and determined that spam eat up 512 terabytes of space every single day. The calculation is pretty rough. In a nutshell, they took an estimate that 120 billion spam emails are sent every day, and then multiplied that number by 4.37 kilobytes, or the size of a typical junk email message.
In other words, email service providers are wasting a lot of money on server space for junk messages. Of course, the only reason spammers send their emails is because for every few thousand people that ignore their pleas, a handful of people will click on a link and buy something, fall for a scam, or inadvertently install a virus or trojan on their PC. So for now, the best solution is to use an email service like Gmail that includes an excellent junk mail filter, and never ever look at your spam folder. But it'd be nice if there was a way to just make those emails all go away.
Social networks are certainly popular and useful these days, but if there's one annoyance they've created it would have to be the abundance of unsolicited emails that they produce. Unlike spam, which is unsolicited email for products and services you have nothing to do with, many are referring to the emails generated by social networks and the like as "bac'n". Basically, it's a more legitimate form of unsolicited email because you have some sort of relationship with the host service.
Most of these services grow in large part by finding ways to engineer their users into inviting as many friends as possible. In Twitter's case, the only way to find out if one of your friends is using the service is to send them an invitation. While I'm sure this is quite effective for Twitter, it's also a bit nasty.
If you've been hesitant to spam, sorry, "bac'n" your friends with signup requests for Twitter (a service they may have little or no interest in), you might be happy to learn that some enterprising individuals have generated TwitterSearch. With TwitterSearch you can enter a list of email addresses, and it will return links to each person's Twitter page that it can find.
This is a tool that really ought to be built in to Twitter, and it should be able to link in to your email address book the same way Facebook and other social tools do. In fact, it probably will, sooner or later.
Hot on the heels of Google announcing their integration of the Postini security solutions into Gmail through their acquisition, Yahoo! lets us know that they are upgrading their Spam filters.
Yahoo! Mail will be releasing a new security upgrade to their email system that is said to block spam, particularly all that junk you might be getting for eBay and PayPal scams. They call the new technology 'DomainKeys', and it will block all phishing, spam and fraudulent emails that might try and sneak in to your inbox. This will all be achieved by verifying the domain of the sender. Sounds like such a simple solution, but we are sure it's more complex under the hood.
The new security updates should be fully rolled out in a few weeks. Also, users should all have been upgraded to include the new mail to sms feature.
In what seems to us to be an obvious violation of end-user privacy, it appears that also-ran social network service Quechup is sending out unsolicited e-mails looking for new members. What's worse, they appear to be harvesting the target invitees' e-mail addresses from current members' address books and sending them invitations. In the last week, non-members started to get messages like this in their inboxes:
"Jon Doe (jondoe@gmail.com) has invited you as a friend on Quechup... ...the social networking platform sweeping the globe Click here to accept Jon's invite
You can use Quechup to meet new people, catch up with old friends, maintain a blog, share videos & photos, chat with other members, play games, and more. It's no wonder Quechup is fast becoming 'The Social Networking site to be on'."
Interestingly, it appears that we're not the only ones this has happened to. Make sure you read that privacy policy when you sign up, or you could be giving away your friends' e-mail addresses.
Pfizer is a pretty big drug manufacturer is it not? Then why have they been hawking Viagra and fake Rolex watches through their email network?
Apparently some of Pfizers computers have been sending out emails that are not part of their marketing efforts. Malware has infected a number of the drug giant's computers and instructed them to send out spam on behalf a very ingenious hacker that has penetrated their systems that should have been well sealed up. A security based company let Wired into what was happening, and has stated that Pfizer's computers have been sending out spam for the past six months from over 138 different Pfizer IP addresses hawking their own goods, as well as junk stocks and penis enlargement products.
There is no word from Pfizer whether they know what's going on inside their own computer network yet. Maybe they are keeping it a little hush hush for now until quarterly earnings prove that the hacker's efforts are affecting their bottom lines in a good way.
Many of us have been in this situation: you want to post your email address on your website so that people can read it, click a link, and get in touch with you. You're worried about displaying your email as a regular link, though, because bots will index it and start sending you spam. If you want to post your email address on a website so that it's readable by humans, but obfuscated from any bots trying to harvest it, take a look at The Enkoder.
When it comes to dealing with blog spam, there is no shortage of tools. Blogger comes with a built-in Google crafted tool, WordPress has 
30 fateful years have passed since what is believed to be the 
In what seems to us to be an obvious violation of end-user privacy, it appears that also-ran social network service 
