Anonymous email links will be encoded soon
Posted by admin on August 27th, 2007
It appears there are 1 or 2 spammers harvesting the anonymous email links on our sites and then sending spam to them. From what we can see most of this is ending up in spam/junk email boxes and not reaching your inbox but to be proactive we will be encoding these email links (I will post when this has been completed). What does this mean? Well, for one the link will more than likely say “click here to respond to this ad” rather than pers-####@thedatelist.com as it does now.
Now comes the question of using web based email clients like Yahoo as there is no longer an email address to copy and paste into your Yahoo email. Until a feasible solution is found you will need to click the link which will open the email client on your PC and then copy the email address from there. While that is not an ideal solution it will keep the spammers at bay for now. We will continue to work to make a better solution to this. It may also be in your benefit to use Gmail and have that email read by your email client on your PC and also allowing you to respond to ads using your Gmail email address without having to copy an paste.
To get a Gmail account click on this link - www.gmail.com. For explanation of how to get your mail on your PC using Gmail do the following - create the email account > login to the email account > click on settings > click on the Forwarding and POP tab > select Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on > click save changes. Also, on the Forwarding and POP page you will see a link for configuration instructions - click on it and then select the email client you have on your PC to configure it to get the mail from Gmail.
September 2nd, 2007 at 11:29 am
Seems the spam has stopped but we will still be making changes to prevent future spam. The idea we came up with is as follows; Links to reply to ads will be pers-#### without the domain name. So if you are replying to an ad on thedatelist.com and are using a web based email client such as gmail or yahoo you will copy the pers-#### and then add the @thedatelist.com (using thedatelist.com as an example). If you use an email client on your PC/Mac such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or any of the others you just have to click the link.
The links will be encoded even though they show the correct first part of the email so that spammers will not be able to harvest them.