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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5003607

by bonzoq • 14 years ago

4 9 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

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?

bonzoq4• 14 years ago

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_lishin3• 14 years ago

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So if someone sent an outdated contact address a piece of spam, the system would reply back with the correct up-to-date e-mail address to which they could then send the spam?

amikazmi• 14 years ago

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.

bonzoq4• 14 years ago

If that's the case then I guess this is not such a great idea for a startup:).

Chris_X• 14 years ago

Here's a simple solution that works: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/emailriddler/

No startup needed.

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

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