bot spammed2 min read

Botnets cause significant surge in spam

pheew. it’s not only me then. as it seems there has been a general surge in spam over these last few months. now while this information may come as a slight relief in some sense, not only i was the target, it still sucks ofc having to go through and delete numbers of spam on a daily basis.

on my end the spammers have started to use the contact forms on my various websites to send me spam. while in one way this is less annoying than comment spam on my blog – at least that problem seems to be sorted thanks to akismet and captcha – in another way and more specifically for me personally this makes things much worse. it does happen quite frequently that people – in this case non-spammers, and yes, spammers can’t be considered people any longer, hah, they are now officially bots [see above] – real people contact me using the contact form, which means i am having to go through each contact email as it might always be a genuine attempt to contact me.

i was tought, that it’s good practice to hide actual email adresses and to instead install form-to-mail scripts, that hide email adresses. i am no longer sure this makes sense. when i receive normal email in most cases i can immediately spot the spam by looking at just subject line or sender and just delete them. plus most of them will already get caught by spam filters. the mails i receive via my contact form all have the same subject and sender, which in practice means i am having to open each adn every one. one big advantage is that nothing else can be included via forms, no html. but with spammers using my contact forms, i am starting to think it would almost be smarter to just include a specific email adress to collect spam and let the spam filters do some of the work.