Ugly E-mail Addresses
W e all hate spam and we keep looking for ways to reduce how much reaches our inbox. I filter a lot of it out at the server, but some makes it through anyway, such as those e-mail message that appear to have been sent from my own e-mail address. For those, I have a rule set up that just deletes them, as everyone should. If everyone would delete them without looking at them, spammers would stop wasting their time sending them. One method of controlling spam that has gotten popular among people in the writing community is to list their e-mail address as something like somename [at] adomain [dot] com . The idea is that the web crawlers won’t realize that it is an e-mail address and thus protect the owner from receiving unwanted e-mails. Some people go ahead and create the mailto link, as I have done above, while others leave it out. In either case, all this method only discourages the people you want to e-mail you from doing so. Mangling the e-mail address like this will not keep the addr...