I had a lead for a guy today. I sent him an email to tell him so and to put him in touch with the potential client.
I received back a Spamarrest email asking me to click on a link to verify that I am not a spammer. A pain in the ass, after all I am doing this guy a favour, but ok I’ll click it. I then have to click another link on the page which opens up and when I do that, I am presented with this CAPTCHA screen to fill out. Guys, CAPTCHAs are evil. Stop using them. Now.
Forget it!
I hate spam but I also hate people who are too damn lazy to put a proper anti-spam solution in place and instead throw the burden back on the email sender.
Ironically when I received that same reply, from the same sender by the looks of it (Ewan). It was caught by my spam filter in gmail, I found it about two weeks later but I had been wondering why I got no reply from him.
Completely agree with your views on spam prevention Tom, although I don’t know if I would go so far as saying lazy, but I would use words not far from there.
I find, if you do need to resort to any Turing test type prevention a simple challenge based one is best and even better if you write it yourself. I have used one in the past the simply asks what is one plus one? As I wrote it, there are no automated bots out there are programed for it, like some of the open source plugins, and the text field and label are named something other than anti-spam to fully mis-lead any bots.
The question is how to handle spam that comes to your non-gmail account.
It is easy to handle email forms, but how do you handle those emails that comes directly to you? any recommendations?
Good email client software should catch most spam but if you want to reduce the amount of spam getting to your email client software use an upstream spam stopper. Your ISP may know of one.
I use emailcloud and find it quite good.
Thanks for the quick reply Tom.
I’m using thunderbird these days, as it’s the easiest portable application I know and it has many functions and great extentions, but I can’t find good, free of charge addons that blocks spam.
Ido, why forward all your mail to a gmail account/have gmail pop it, and pop it from there. There is also google apps for your domain that is worth looking .
Hi Ciaran,
Well, I’m pretty paranoid and Gmail had decelerated before that they read/scan mails all the time.
I do use gmail for some purposes, but not always and in any case I wouldn’t want to share everything with either Google or any other third party.
Good post. I agree with everything you say. If someone resorts to such a solution they better take the burden of clearing emails from those they want to get email from (not expecting those sending them email they want to get to do so. Gmail has pretty great spam trapping too – so just use that if you have a problem (though if you are worried about Google then maybe not…).
I believe that the idea to forward emails from a webmaster@… account to another (gmail) account is very good. On the other hand I am paranoid as Ido (despite the fact that I cannot change the future and google is already our ‘bigbrother’). We shouldn’d underestimate that, Ido is right and we Germans are maybe more sensitive to such questions.
But there are lots of free of chare email accounts you can sign up.
.
lavabit.com has a pretty advanced spam protection and provides pop for free (no I am not the webmaster