Cleaning an email address up

means off

[caine]

planning to drop an email address from a site / change for another with some quite serious protection, (gets about 50+ spam a day), though need to keep the email address, as returning customers order / enquire on it. Its in a lot of email spider programs!

Any suggestions how to clean it up?

[Learning Curve]

What are you asking?

[bill]

Stick an auto-responder on it for 6 months with a message telling everyone this address is dead...then trash it. Once you're on those lists, you're on for the duration it seems.

[ukgimp]

can you run a filter so that only your possible returning customers get through to a folder and the rest get trashed. Get really strict with the rules and be prepared to lose one or two. I dont know how many customers you are talking but if it is not 1000's you should be able to set up some decent rules.

[cornwall]

I wash all my emails through SpamCop. You can set your own spam level there, but I have reduced my spam from 300 a day (unliveable with) to about 6 or 7, without effecting customers ability in getting through

[TheDoctor]

Once you're on those lists, you're on for the duration it seems.

This, fortunately, isn't my experience. I replaced most of the simple email addresses on my main site with javascript functions sometime in the middle of September, and, by the middle of October, most spam to these had ceased. There's only a couple of old favourites that keep trying.

I know that the harvesters are still reading my HTML and the spammers are still sending stuff, since one address hasn't been changed (for reasons that are irrelevant to this discussion) and it still gets spammed good and hard.

Seems like the lists are changed fairly rapidly, and if you find a way of becoming invisible to the harvesters you'll reduce the amount of spam you get almost overnight.