Making contact survivable

For years, I bravely posted my email addresses on the web with a “mailto:” link — trusting my email spam filters to keep the annoyance within manageable limits.  And that worked, for many years.  I’ve had my address posted on the web for all spammers to scrape since 1997.  But lately things have gotten a lot worse.  I get so much spam that not only do I not have time to inspect it for false positives, I can’t even get into my spam filter at all because it takes too long to load.  Fine, I’ll trust that there aren’t any good emails getting spam-bucketed and just let them expire.

But what finally broke the Inbox’s back was some spammer’s escalation of the practice of spoofing my account as the sender of spam to others.  They must be sending out thousands of messages a day pretending to be me, because the number that bounce back is in the hundreds.  Fortunately, all of these that I’ve looked at so far aren’t using my real account, but rather aliases that I’ve published on the web that forward to my real account.  So, I’ve decided to take down those forwarders and to replace every published bare address with a contact form instead (or a link to one).

Now that I have all three of my sites on WordPress, I decided to look for a WordPress plugin that presents a spam-safe contact form — or write one if I couldn’t find one.  The Great Google led me to my old blogbuddy Doug Karr, who has adapted an existing plugin to create the WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection plugin.  The “Spam Protection” part is achieved via a challenge question of your choosing.  The plugin is highly customizable, and secured against cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.

I placed one of these forms on the Contact page for each of my blogs.  The only thing that required more than two minutes was to think of an appropriate challenge question for each one.  Here’s what I came up with:

Appropriate, don’t you think?

OK, I did go back and add a hint to the last one.