The Email Wars

I came across this blog post. It is worth the read. It made me think about all of the clients we have worked with that place the company emails all over thier sites. Such a bad practice. I would rec placing a form to contact you and routing it to the approporiate person. Links (or mailto:) are just going to get farmed and end up dropping spam all over your servers.

We had one client (name with held) that had the entire company directory on the site. And due to this they got over 40000 spam emails a day. I told them to remove the directory, change all email addresses (like first initial last name) and send out an email to all contacts about the change in structure.

And needless to say they had a full time person who’s sole job it was to handle spam using 3 different systems. Such a waste of time and money.

Directory Harvesting Attacks Explained

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve started to receive SPAM on an email address you’ve just created? How can this be possible if you never gave it to anyone? Unfortunately, keeping your address private does not necessarily protect you against spammers anymore. These guys know how to harvest addresses from a mail server without you even knowing about it. This technique is known as Directory Harvesting and here’s how it works.

Read the Article
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/05/directory-harvesting-attacks-explained.html