Sorry, I’m going to get very “webmaster/techie” on you for this post….

Via Slashdot: a wonderful detailed explanation of how spambots work to harvest email addresses off your website. Neil Gunton is developer and consultant who’s spent a lot of time thinking about this behavior, and how to prevent it. Here is his procedure to install a dynamic spamtrap.

And if you’re a user, you know enough never ever to post a “good” email address en clair on a website, right? No matter how good the site is, or how conscientious you know the webmaster to be, there is software Out There that can be used to “crawl” web sites and harvest your address. That only has to happen once; after that, your address will be passed around and sold from spammer to spammer, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.

I spend a lot of time preaching to users, especially new users, about the wisdom of getting yourself a bunch of “disposable” email addresses, and never, ever, give out your real address to anyone but your most trusted intimates. Once you get that first piece of spam, you’re done for; it will never stop. But you can prevent it by getting yourself a webmail address (I use Yahoo and the now-defunct Altavista.net.)