I just thought I'd write an update on my fight against spam here on brindleweb. I posted an entry a few months ago about my new contact form that I created so that people can e-mail me without me having to post my e-mail address explicitly. I've been continuing to take more and more steps to fight spam, here they are.

For myself:

1. As stated above, I replaced anywhere I posted my e-mail address on these pages with the contact form.
2. I stopped accepting emails to any random address for my domain, and only accept the one or two I want to use. Others will get bounced.
3. I changed most of the addresses I do use that I currently get spam at. For example, I used to use webmaster@... for website-related e-mail and rescue@... for e-mail about my rescue site. Both of those were getting tons of spam, so I stopped using them and deleted their inboxes, thus reassigning those as simply "random addresses for this domain" (which I now bounce as per item #2).
4. I use Mailwasher to filter, delete, and bounce any remaining spam that I get. Unfortunately it doesn't do this automatically, but it is just a one-button press to process all the new mail at once.
5. I no longer give out my e-mail to ANYONE. I don't fill it in on any forms, or give it out when ordering from anywhere. To get around doing this I use a great new service called Sneakemail. It creates sort of random addresses for you that forward to your real address. You can create as many of these as you want and "tag" them with the purpose you created them. That way you can use them for online ordering, joining forums, and all that. If you start getting spam at one of them, you can just delete it. In addition, if you make a unique one everytime and label it with why you created it, you can even tell WHO gave out your address to the spammers! This is a great idea and I highly recommend it!
6. To help stop spam overall and get spammers in trouble, I report the spam I get through SpamCop. This site parses spam to figure out who to complain to about it, plus keeps records of spam senders and ISPs.

For YOU, my readers/users:

1. For the blog readers, I have installed a MovableType plugin called MTObfuscate. This uses javascript to encode the e-mail addresses that people post in the comments and such, so that it cannot be easily harvested by spammers.
2. For my bbs users, I have enabled a "blind e-mail" feature so that their e-mail addresses do not get posted on the board. Instead if somebody wants to e-mail them there is a form to do it.

Whew! So, there is a lot of action on the spam-fighting front here on brindleweb. I HATE spam!!!! I do have a few questions though, if anyone reading has any suggestions, let me know!

My questions:

1. In spite of all the actions I took above, I still do get spam to one of my accounts (one that existed before I became so spam-wary, and that I really don't want to give up). So for these e-mails I am bouncing them and reporting them through SpamCop... is there anything else I can do? Will I ever be able to purge this account of Spam, or once the e-mail is out there is it doomed forever?
2. I'd like to protect other e-mails on my site (people who post in the Guestbook, for instance), with something similar to the MTObfuscate mechanism. Maybe with a PHP function that I can just call whenever I do need to display an e-mail address. Does anyone have any ideas?

That's all for now, folks.