Webmaster Spam

Having your email address on a prominent website seems to subject you to a lot of custom-tailored spam.

On a daily basis, several of my addresses get pitched web hosting, online advertising and site design. My favorite unwanted emails are those pitching spam tools. That's sending spam, not blocking spam.

My anti-spam filtering system catches most of this stuff, but it does disproportionately seem to sneak through. The messages tend to be short, and low on HTML content. They also tend to lack "remove" notices. All of this makes it a bit tougher to block junk messages like these.

I also love the pitches from foreign web design companies - "You have very good product, but your website is ugly and needs help." Sorry, ugly sells, but your spam doesn't.

It also seems like spam coming into my older accounts is more, "legit" - as in I may have really opted in to some of it at some point long ago. Not that I'd specifically asked to get spammed - more likely it was hidden at the bottom of some privacy agreement.

I'm also suspicious that giving my email address at job fairs has gotten me on various lists I'd rather not be on. At this point the address has been bought and sold so many times, tracking it down and asking to "unsubscribe" would be pointless.

SpamButcher is one of the next generation of spam email programs that outperform older simple-text filtering systems. It can be downloaded for free trial from this site. Most users report that it has resolved their issue with unwanted messages.

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