A few days ago, I realised that a person from WorkBoxers had linked to me, so naturally I checked out their site. Unfortunately, although Jamsi from the site did praise Blogtrepreneur, he was more concerned about my blogging safety.
I’m not sure how he managed to research this, but he had noticed that my email address for Blogtrepreneur was plastered all over the internet. Stupidly, whilst I had been in forums, and in my submitted articles on Ezine.com, I had left my email address in the text. As a result, my email was showing up for 19 results when searching on Google.
There is a problem with this. According to Jamsi, spambots are able to scan through the internet very quickly and send loads of spam to the email addresses it finds. The only way to combat this is to not write your email address on the internet at all. Although I’ve not really seen that much spam directed to my account, this has definitely put me on edge, and Im now worried whether I’ve left other security holes in my blog.
These mistakes are quite common, and as a blogger, I should have seen this coming. All is not lost however, but I will have to be more alert in the future. My contact page does not show my email address now, and instead uses a very cool plugin from Wordpress called InTouch, which automatically generates a custom build contact form which forwards the message to my account. The email address then remains invisible from “spamming” eyes. Have you ever had any problems with security on the internet?
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10 responses so far ↓
1 Dan Marques // Jun 28, 2006 at 3:49 pm
I get probably around 20-50 spam emails a day between two emails accounts. I also get 1-5 instances of trackback or comment spam on my blog. In my eyes its a cost of doing business and I just work hard to not make it too easy for the spammers and delete the emails as soon as they enter my inbox.
2 adnan // Jun 28, 2006 at 4:00 pm
I suppose every business does have its up and down sides. Out of all things resulting out of the growth of this blog, spam is one of the worst. I know I’ve not got it that bad at the moment, but when my site gets indexed on Google the spam will probably be awful. How do you cope with that much spam everyday?
3 Dan Marques // Jun 28, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Typepad does a better job of automatically filtering some spam, as opposed to wordpress (although I think there are some plugins you can get that help).
On the email side, some of the spam is picked up and goes into a ‘bulk mail’ folder which i pretty much just empty, the rest i delete as soon as i see it.
4 adnan // Jun 28, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Oh right. I’ve heard that Akismet for Wordpress is very good, but I havn’t got round to installing the plugin yet. Unfortunately, you have to create an account on wordpress.com in order to get a code for Akismet!
5 Dennis // Jun 28, 2006 at 4:15 pm
I never saw spam as a major problem other than it being annoying. Akismet is very useful and setting up an account on Wordpress is free.
6 adnan // Jun 28, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Dennis, you have a very popular blog, how much spam do you get and how do you deal with it?
Yeah, I just setup a Wordpress account, so just waiting for the API key.
7 Dennis // Jun 28, 2006 at 5:43 pm
All my email is forwarded to my gmail account, it has a useful spam blocker. I check my email quite often throughout the day, so I just delete any spam that comes up. Its as if I’m use to it now haha
8 adnan // Jun 28, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Hmm, maybe my Hotmail Spam Blocker is working after all. I know I should switch to Gmail, but I don’t really need to, and I can’t be bothered to update to a different service.
We shouldn’t have to become accustomed to spam. Its a shame that we actually take it for granted. There must be something bigger that everyone could do to help (apart from not responding to SPAM emails!)
9 Andreas Bard // Jun 28, 2006 at 9:30 pm
I get alot of spam everyday to my main mail, but I have never really seen it like a problem, but it is definately very very annoying.
//Andreas Bard
10 Matt // Jun 29, 2006 at 12:48 am
Just a hint for anyone that needs to post their email address on the net. Do it like name [at] place [dot] com. Makes it harder for spambots to pick up. Also, you can use a JavaScript. See http://wettone.com/code/emailhiding for more info.
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