

Review my startup idea: Reduce spam sent to company's contact e-mail  - bonzoq

I experienced it myself, from time to time we get spam sent to our company's contact e-mail displayed on the front page.<p>One work around is replacing the '@' character with 'at' or something similar. However we did not want to do that, as we wanted a clickable link.<p>I think a good solution to this problem would be an e-mail address that changes periodically, say from: contact_2323@company.abc.com to contact_23a2@company.abc.com. where abc.com (for example) would be the domain of my startup, and company the name of a customer. This changing e-mail would only be valid for a limited time.<p>The idea is to provide a piece of code that changes the e-mail and handling redirections. What do you think?
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Chris_X
Here's a simple solution that works:
<http://www.dynamicdrive.com/emailriddler/>

No startup needed.

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amikazmi
If all you want is a clickable link, you can set it with javascript- almost
every "real" person runs javascript, and most of the spam bots don't.

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bonzoq
If that's the case then I guess this is not such a great idea for a startup:).

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pavel_lishin
The problem is that if I save contact_2323@example.com in my address book, and
it changes two weeks later, I suddenly stop receiving responses from you, and
have no idea why.

Also, how is this a startup idea?

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bonzoq
Well usually when you contact a company through their contact e-mail you get
response from a concrete person and their e-mail you can save in your address
book. Also, if someone still did that and their message wouldn't get through,
they'd get a message with the valid address to contact and so would the
company be informed on the contact attempts.

Although the word startup is broadly abused these days, I used this because I
could provide this service (the piece of code that changes e-mail,
redirections, auto-responses and so on) and charge for it.

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pavel_lishin
> Also, if someone still did that and their message wouldn't get through,
> they'd get a message with the valid address to contact and so would the
> company be informed on the contact attempts.

So if someone sent an outdated contact address a piece of spam, the system
would reply back with the correct up-to-date e-mail address to which they
could then send the spam?

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bonzoq
Exactly, but that would be useless for a bot sending spam, wouldn't it?

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pavel_lishin
What? It would give them a current, working e-mail address to send more spam
to.

