Ahoy Captain - Spam Bots on the Horizon!

by Hava Lyon | More from this Blogger

06 Apr 2007 03:00 PM

Okay, so I think I'm a lot funnier than I really am, what can I say? Today, I wanted to talk about spam bots, and why it is that people write their e-mail addresses so strangely (myself is included in that bunch.)

First off, spam bots are not large metallic robots crawling all over spam, although that picture is a bit closer to the truth than you might think. Spam bots are programs (robots without the metal body) that are sent out onto the world wide web to search for e-mail addresses. Every time they find one, the data is sent back to the people who wrote the programs (evil horrible people that they are) and these people take these harvested e-mail addresses and either sell them to other (evil horrible) people, or use them for their own nefarious purposes. Either way, you end up with an inbox full of "The Nigerian president wants to give you a million dollars if you will only give him back $20,000 of it!" or worse yet, the yucky sex ones that you wonder how people can send out in good conscience--what if it was an eight year old who got that e-mail??

As inventive as people are (hey, let's write a program that will look for and save all e-mail addresses it finds!) we luckily have just as many people on the other side, working hard to preserve our privacy, or at least our inboxes. Although there are a lot of reasons PMs (private messages) was invented, one of the reasons was because then people didn't have to post their e-mail addresses on the Internet for others to could get in touch with them through. They simply have to say, "PM me" and no addresses are involved. Brilliant.

What about the situations where you can't PM someone? I have several private blogs, and none of them allow for PMs. So if I want someone to get in touch with me, I have to give out my e-mail address. That's where the funky set-ups of e-mails come into play.

Spam bots are programmed to find an e-mail address that looks like this: whoever@wherever.com When the e-mail address is split up funny, like this: who ever [at] wherever dot com then the spam bots don't find them, saving the inbox from the onslaught of junk they would have had to otherwise endure.

So when I say, "My e-mail address is Hava L {at} Families dot com--please e-mail me your thoughts," I am not trying to be funny or entertaining--I am simply trying to avoid those spam bots. I have seen people read advertisements where the e-mail address was spaced out all funny, and those people would repost those e-mail addresses on forums without the spacing and funny formatting. If someone is smart enough to write their e-mail address the right way in the first place, you can be pretty darn certain they want it rewritten that same way. Please respect other people's wishes (and inboxes) by writing their e-mail addresses correctly.

Now that I've shown my faithful readers (all two of them--hi you guys!) how to fight and win against the spam bots, I am off to kill a couple myself. I see they're coming in off the port bow, and I can't let them invade my inbox.

Cheers!

Learn more about Hava Lyon

Hello, my name is Hava or Havs (depending on my mood and yours!) I am a freelance writer who writes for several blogs, both paid ones such as this one, and personal blogs.

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