BIG SPAM issue

[member22]

Hello,

I am not sure where to post my question but for the last 3 weeks I have been receiving about 30 SPAMS a day coming from some chinese website that is trying to sell me viagra and I can't get ride of this spam.

It is sending the email from a different email address everytime and it event managed to get my automatic reply email and I get 2 emails everytime... the spam email + my automatic reply...

I did try to block it in my cpanel, it worked a bit but not a lot and now I am wondering what to do...

My email address contact at example.com got caught on my website as I have a link on my site in my contact page.

I am thinking either to write it as text instead or write contact(at)example.com or create a form but I am worried it is already too late !

what should I do can anyone help me ?

Thank you,

[edited by: engine at 6:09 pm (utc) on May 28, 2009]
[edit reason] examplified [/edit]

[jinxed]

I think the best option is to buy the Viagra.

No seriously - I think the best option would be to have a secure contact form instead.

[member22]

I agree about the secure contact from but isn't it too late ? see that they already got my email in their listing ?

I tried to contact them as i found their contact info through their domain name registration but doubt it will work ?

[LifeinAsia]

Dump that e-mail address and start over with a new one. It's been compromised and the amount of SPAM will most likely increase as the SPAMMER sells that confirmed address to other SPAMMERS.

If you have a lot of legit people that use that address to contact you, send out a message with the new address.

Even if they don't get it from your website, they can guess common ones like [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], etc.

[edited by: engine at 6:10 pm (utc) on May 28, 2009]
[edit reason] examplified [/edit]

[Rosalind]

I am thinking either to write it as text instead or write contact(at)mywebsite.com or create a form but I am worried it is already too late !

It is already too late. However, when you start over be careful what obfuscation you use. My honeypot picked up almost as many spam emails to contact [at] example.com as it did to a raw mailto: address. Using contact(at)example.com probably won't be any better.

If you absolutely must put your address online, try hex or ISO character encoding, or javascript. Just bear in mind that no method will eliminate all spam.

[Baruch Menachem]

I had a really cool javascript I got off the web that printed the address on the screen as true text, but on the web page is was gibberish. I will look through my old web stuff and try to find it, if you really want it. It just reversed it.

But the reality is, forms work a whole lot better. I am a bad boy and I don't even look at the standard admin type email addresses.
But you pretty much have to dump the old address, as LifeinAsia said. Once the spammers get ahold of your address, your problems with email grow exponentially.

[MrHard]

When we switched hosting on the website our spam went from about 100 a day to 5-10. Staying low for a couple years now.

We still use the same email address. Something you may want to consider.

[piatkow]

Trouble is that even just sending emails can give the address to the spammers, it just takes one recipient with an infected machine.

I have noticed a lot more getting through my filters lately, now up to five or six a day rather than one or two a week. The pond life are learning unfortunately.