Review my startup idea: Reduce spam sent to company's contact e-mail
4 comments
Here's a simple solution that works: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/emailriddler/
No startup needed.
No startup needed.
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The problem is that if I save [email protected] 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?
Also, how is this a startup idea?
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.
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.
> 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So if someone sent an outdated contact address a piece of spam, the system would reply back with the correct up-to-date e-mail address to which they could then send the spam?
So if someone sent an outdated contact address a piece of spam, the system would reply back with the correct up-to-date e-mail address to which they could then send the spam?
Exactly, but that would be useless for a bot sending spam, wouldn't it?
What? It would give them a current, working e-mail address to send more spam to.
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.
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: [email protected] to [email protected]. 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?