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

4 points by bonzoq ↗ HN
I experienced it myself, from time to time we get spam sent to our company's contact e-mail displayed on the front page.

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.

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.

The idea is to provide a piece of code that changes the e-mail and handling redirections. What do you think?

12 comments

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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?

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.

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So if someone sent an outdated contact address a piece of spam, the system would reply back with the correct up-to-date e-mail address to which they could then send the spam?

bonzoq
Exactly, but that would be useless for a bot sending spam, wouldn't it?
pavel_lishin
What? It would give them a current, working e-mail address to send more spam to.
bonzoq
They could just as well look it up on the company website. It's just that bots just send spam to the email addresses they have on a list.
[dead] Solomean
Just use a form dude.
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.
bonzoq
If that's the case then I guess this is not such a great idea for a startup:).
Chris_X
Here's a simple solution that works: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/emailriddler/

No startup needed.

[deleted]
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Chris_X
Good question. I've used it for years and always assumed it works. If Google bots can execute javascript, spammers can probably do it too. My only hope is they don't want to do it because it's resource intensive.