Don't laugh, but I still have one of these

If you’re a fan or irony you’ll like this post. I originally got my start selling bulk email software in 1997 with this domain (Desktopserver.com) which was the name of our mailing software. It was back before there was a spam problem, but of course those days are long gone. What really happened was the big spam houses opened overseas in China, Brazil, as well as Russia and all heck broke loose.

In short, the way you get spam now is your email address gets harvested by an automatic robot that scans web pages and compiles lists. Then you get more pitches, promises, and offers than the only woman aboard a submarine. There is a sure fire way to defeat them though.

The best is to create a new email box that’s never been used before, then obfuscate it before putting it on any web page or blog. What it does is encode it in a way that people can see and click on in a browser, but the harvesters can’t see this format. The reasons no harvesters have ever been written to scan for this kind of coded email address are it would slow it down quite a bit, and nobody wants that feature. Customers who buy them just wouldn’t see a collector that can get an email that a person is going through so much trouble to hide as a valuable feature. Also so few people obfuscate, that it wouldn’t be worth coding it just to get a piddly few more addresses.

This place has a good free converter. You can use it on an address you already get spam on, but it’s not going to help as much because the spammer already has your address and are likely blasting away without mercy already. What it does is convert your email address into a very long code which you use on web sites like the contact page.

On a side note, forget about “do not spam lists” or trying to get removed from a Viagra or fake Rolex list, it’s like trying to get pee out of a pool. If you’re picking out a new email box, you’ll always get a certain amount if it’s one of the default ones like sales, info, webmaster, news, and so on. Some harvesters scan new domain registrations and start blasting out to those mailboxes just on the guess they’ll exist.

I’m glad that many years ago I got out of selling that kind of software. It was big money during the dot com boom, but the abusers have gotten so bad these days that I’d have nothing to do with it now. On a good note, if you use an obfuscator on a new email address, you can post that version on all your sites and won’t get a single spam from it.

Nick