Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

OK, you could say that I was naive by including my e-mail address there in the left-hand box for you contact me with your Rainy Day feedback. I mean, we all know that the spam bots are out day and night harvesting the Net for e-mail addresses that are sold on and then suffocated with junk mail. But then again, I wanted to believe that this modest blog would somehow escape the attention of the evil bots. No way.

Yesterday's 67 unwanted mails forced me to face facts. There was a "Want a BIG PENIS?" and a "We list foreign companies on U.S. stock exchanges" plus a "Job Alert" as well as a mysterious "**You are approved!**", not forgetting the strange "you really turn me on amfwtepntoqggsh". But it was the "Strictly Confidential" mail from Dr. Clarke Mbu (PhD) of Victoria Island, Lagos that convinced me to act. The good (?) doctor began:

"First I must solicit your utmost confidentiality in this transaction. I am
making this contact with you based on reliable information available to us, courtesy of the internet business index and confirmed locally by our chamber of commerce and industry, thus we are convinced that you would be capable of providing us with a solution to a money transfer transaction of US$36,400,000.00 (thirty-Six Million, Four Hundred Thousand United States Dollars)."

And on it went like that, getting more fantastic and outrageous with each line. Now one way of avoiding such by-products of the spam bots is to disguise your e-mail address on your site like this: "blogger-at-hotmail-dot-com". The bots can't do anything with that, but many visitors either find it impossible to understand or a chore to change into the functioning e-mail address. There is another way, thanks to Dan P. Benjamin's Hivelogic Email Address Encoder.

As Dan says on his site: "While no solution can create an address impervious to harvesting, this web-based tool will encode your email address using Numerical Equivalents and wrap the result in JavaScript. The final product will be rendered correctly by your browser, but will be nearly-indecipherable by most email harvesting robots." If we take the above fictitious address and follow the simple instructions for feeding it into Dan's encoder, we get:

Paste that into your page and listen to those bots howl with rage. You can see how Dan's service works by checking the "contact him" mouseover in the Rainy Day contact box at the top of this page and then clicking on the link. Only together, can we fight the spammers.