Is anyone else getting flooded with email spam? More than the usual, that is…I’m getting 5-10 thousand heavily randomized and seeming pointless email messages an hour right now. I’ve tweaked my filters a bit to get rid of most of it, but some still leaks through, and it’s rather disturbing to see the numbers on the junk mail folder ticking upwards at such a rate.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
You could try posting your email address on the front page as a graphic, or as something like:
pzmyers AT pharyngula DOT com
Instead of the current link in your profile. Lots of sites do something similar. Not sure if that would help…
I guess those “free” kiddie porn sites aren’t so free after all, eh?
No, but I did send a couple of emails about Paul Nelson that I guess didn’t make it through the filters.
I don’t know if I am or not. Gmail is very good at filtering out spam. I haven’t noticed any uptick.
I never post live, clickable email addresses in any of my websites. Even hashing the address, which used to work, doesn’t anymore. Now I put in a .gif of the address, not readable text.
You recently went out of town. Did you set a ‘vacation responder’ on your email address? That’s an auto-confirm to every spammer that ‘this address is live’.
Or (cue in dark, sinister music) could any fundies be signing you up for every spam list they could think of? Dun-dun-DUHN!!!
Yes, I’ve seen at least a doubling in the amount of spam.
Yes been getting more spam. I have also noticed an increase in the number of e-mails I get asking my help to try to move some money for someone in Nigeria…or money that I am due as the long lost heir of so and so-all they need is my routing address.
PZ, at the risk of being paranoid, there is a possibility that you are being targeted for harassment. My sense is that the visibility of YearlyKos and those who promote it in on the rise. The Fresno Bee (I live in California) gave you guys coverage today. Not exactly the Daily Worker. Maybe it’s just links to cephalopod coupling and the like, but I’d keep a close eye out.
Conspiratorially….Scott
It is nowhere near yours, but the email address I use for my blog has seen a doubling or tripling in spam over the past few weeks. Luckily it all goes into the gmail spam bucket. But yes, it is disturbing.
One thing you might consider is encoding the address with javascript. There are programs around that will do this for you.
I noticed that in the last couple of weeks I had started getting a lot more spam than usual, but the only difference in my web habits was signing up for typekey. HRM.
(Of course, I’m certainly not getting thousands a day – a hundred, yes, a thousand, no.)
I haven’t had a problem with e-mail spam, but I’ve been getting flooded with trackback spam. I’ve been going through my old posts, closing comments and trackbacks. It’s a chore, but I know it will help me avoid trackback spam. I”m getting hundreds of spams per day. It’s annoying. A pox on them.
Could it be related to the Doonesbury Voting Hack from MIT? Or — considering the lower volume you’re receiving — the Rensselaer hack?
At my former public email address, which I haven’t posted for a while (at least a year), I still receive several thousand spam mails per month at the moment, and there has been an uptick in the number.
My current public email adress doesn’t receive anything near that number, probably due to the fact that it’s connected to a Danish domain.
No, that’s the way the left works, not the right. I still receive spam after such an attack on myself after a posted comments on a left-wing news forum. (Since email addresses weren’t publicly shared there, the person who did it contacted me first and got my address when I replied to him. Idiot wasn’t smart enough to hide his IP when he signed me up for the spam, either.)
Also, I see calls for this sort of thing all the time on left-wing forums (like Democrat Underground) and never on right-wing forums. Left-wing forum members publicly post email addresses and no one bats an eye. There may be a few winks and nudges, but no bats. I’ve not seen this same behavior on right-wing forums.
But I doubt anecdotal evidence will convince you otherwise when you’ve blamed “those damned fundies” already. C’est la vie.
I use a link with a Java script under it, so that the address does not exist on the page:
<
Oops! It evaoprated or compiled or something. If you’re interested, send me a message at mona dot albano at gmail dot com.
It’s not just you. The spam had gone relatively quiet in May, only to bounce right back for June.