drucker.ca

Here’s an issue that both touches on usabil­ity, as well as this blog itself:

A vis­i­tor to this blog noted the lack of con­tact infor­ma­tion (such as my email address) in plain view. My answer to him was that this is partly on pur­pose. As many peo­ple know, when you leave your email address on a web page, soft­ware that is designed to har­vest email addresses can eas­ily grab that address and put it in SPAM data­bases. I learned from my Kendall Group web site that doing this resulted in a nearly unus­able email address (ddrucker@ that address is con­stantly inun­dated with hun­dreds of SPAM a day, and only after I com­pletely removed it and put up a ‘closed for busi­ness’ page up has this begun to let up , but not entirely).

There are some solu­tions for this prob­lem, but I’m not sure which to adopt. Here are the ones I know of:

1. List my address as ‘name “at” domain name’ , rather than an address that is actu­ally writ­ten out. This is incon­ve­nient, and relies on the abil­ity of peo­ple to fig­ure it out (and machines to be unable to — I’m not sure if they have improved the SPAM­bots so that they can get around this). It’s a rel­a­tively sim­ple but user unfriendly solu­tion, that is poten­tially use­less if the soft­ware has been made more ‘intel­li­gent’ to get around this subterfuge.
2. Cre­ate a ‘Con­tact Me’ form for the ini­tial email, much like a com­ment, but on it’s own page and with a sim­ple mailto form script. While it’s not par­tic­u­larly ele­gant (and mailto scripts have their own secu­rity prob­lems), it might do the trick. Again, there’s no guar­an­tee that SPAMers might find a way around this one.
3. Include the text “To con­tact me, please use a com­ment.” some­where on the home page. This is eas­i­est, and would have a pretty good chance of get­ting by the SPAM­bots. It is, how­ever, less ‘friendly’, since ini­tial com­mu­ni­ca­tions would be pub­lic and not every­one likes hav­ing their open­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion vis­i­ble to all (even though I can actu­ally choose to not pub­lish the com­ment and still respond via email).
4. Years ago I’d heard of ser­vices where email sent to an address for the first time required the sender to val­i­date them­selves (essen­tially respond to a link in an auto­matic respon­der email). I’ve for­got­ten what it was called, but it sounds good in this case, but I’m not sure what kind of reac­tion it might cause (since it puts most of the respon­si­bil­ity upon the per­son who is ini­tially try­ing to get in touch to ver­ify that they are not a SPAMer)

So, there is my quandary: How to make myself more ‘con­tactable’ with­out open­ing up the door to the inevitable flood of SPAM. I already receive about 2–300 SPAMs a day from my old address, so this is no small issue. I know that there are prob­a­bly some other solu­tions, but I do not want to run extra SPAM soft­ware on my Mac, and do not want to have to buy a PC to run SPAM soft­ware either. I want to stop or dis­cour­age these emails before they are sent, not have some­thing sift through my mail to remove them after­ward. I some­times access my email from the road via web­mail, so extra SPAM-filtering soft­ware doesn’t help there.

Any ideas?