Darn all spammers to heck!

Several of you have emailed me about a spam message you've received with the subject line: Fw: http://www.leoville.com/mt/archives/ I have also received that spam message. The company sending it out, www.trafficbbs.com, is spamming - they have nothing to do with me. Apparently they're harvesting addresses from blog comments. I will attempt to get them to stop but I don't have high hopes. The company slogan is:

Offer you great data of 50,000+ search engines & 120,000+ BBS! Present you to a magic world of instant & effective online communication!

And there's no phone number on the web page. Just a fax number. These things happen all the time. The best defense is to not use your email address anywhere on the web. As long as a page is publicly accessible, a spammer can harvest the addresses. Since most of the time they use automated programs to do the harvesting, it's possible to use a human readable address that confounds the robots. Something like: leo at (die spammers die) leoville.com I'm sorry that that's necessary, but that's the way of the web, alas.