Well, almost two weeks ago I reported that I had been given a Gmail account, and experimentally included my Gmail address as a hyperlink in the message here on my Weblog. This morning I received my first spam to the account, a message that has nothing to do with the few contexts where I’ve shared the new Gmail address. My conclusion: they must have scraped it from this Web site.
Ten days.
Something to think about when you add mailto: links on your site!
If the e-mail address were a mailto or any kind of hyperlink, I can understand how incredibly easy it would be to scrape the information from a website, but would the same be true if you had me@online.com in the text? Could they not use a slightly more sophisticated script to catch those?
Apparently yes. Spammers have gotten pretty smart. My solution is really to just have a form for input rather than an email address…