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Email Editorials An Email Link Experiment Ever wonder whether putting an email link on your web page has anything to do with all that spam you get? A couple of years ago I tried an experiment. I made up a dctech.com email address and embedded a link to it on a web page - like this <a href="mailto:....@dctech.com"></a>. If you can read HTML you will see what this does - it pretends that there is a link for a person to click on in order to send email to the given address. However, nothing ever appears on the web page that a human would see or click on. This email address was not given out to anybody anywhere, it was an experiment to see how email gathering spiders pick up on Click here to send me email links. I then created an autoresponder that would send the following message to the "Reply-to" address for any email sent to this address. Guess what - you have just sent email to an address that has not been legitimately given to anybody, anywhere, at any time. It is only a link on a web page intended to show people they were suckers if they bought a list of email addresses believing it to be legitimate leads to people interested in their product. Its probably too late to get your money back, but at least you'll know better than to ever fall for that again... and tell your friends too! The only way anybody got this address is by combing web pages for addresses, not by anybody filling out any form anywhere indicating that they wanted to receive any kind of information from anyone. There is no human reading this, this response is sent automatically to anybody sending email to the "wrong" address. From time to time I've gone into the email logs and seen the impact of this link. Little surprise, this address was receiving hundreds of spam letters in no time at all. Something I hadn't thought of though - it was also receiving lots of viruses, and from people I had never heard of. Why? It turns out that one way that viruses can check your computer for addresses is looking for mailto: links on web pages that are in your browser cache. So, if you had recently visited this page when you got infected with a virus, the fake address would likely be sent a copy of the virus. Conclusion: if you get mailto: links to your email address on some web pages, be prepared to receive more spam and viruses. But there's more... Have you been unjustly accused of sending spam or viruses yet? If not, your email address hasn't propagated very far yet. Spam and viruses rely on stealth, faking the return address is an essential ingredient of that. Here is the irony of my experiment - I now get email which is "from" my fake address. I also get sent copies of the above letter as the fake address gets sent email "from" my real email address. The more widely your email address has been spread, the more it will be used as the fake sender of spam and viruses. A web page link to your email address is one way of getting it widely spread.