Spam
Spam is unsolicited email. We all get it. Often, the way companies obtain your email address to send you spam is with what are called 'bots'. Bots are computer programs that read webpages to find email addresses. It logs all the address it finds, and then that company can send all the email it wants to you. They often include an 'unsubscibe' link at the bottom of the email, but that's just for show.

I have taken steps to protect you (and me!) from spam. If you've worked with html (the language used to make webpages) then you probably know how to make a link to send someone email. You use mailto: and the email address. These bots look for the 'mailto:' link, then record the email address that follows. So guestbooks and discussion boards are like a jackpot, since they contain so many email links. None of the email links on hamalyzer.com use the mailto tag. If you look at the guestbook, hold your mouse over a name and look at the link. First, there's no mailto tag. There's a cgi script that's called instead. Second, some bots are good enough to recognize an email address even without the mailto tag. They look for the '@' symbol, or '.com' or other extension. So the address is printed backwards (no '.com' or other recognizeable extension) and the '@' is replaced with a '*'. The cgi script takes this jumble, makes the good email address out of it, and spits it back out to your browser, as though it were the normal mailto tag. None of us are 100% safe from spam, but I think this system is pretty effective.

As an added bonus, there is an anti-spam link on the main page, containing a list of bogus email addresses. When the bot finds this page, it thinks it hit the jackpot. But all the email it sends to those address will be returned, causing potentially millions of messages to flow into it's inbox. It feels good just thinking about it. This might (hopefully) discourages these types of companies from spamming.

Chris