Spam ~ It's Not Just In Cans

One of the more frustrating things about putting yourself 'out there' in Bloggityville is that inevitably, you're gonna end up being the target of spammers.

I think the recent speight of giveaways, and the multiple 'leaving email address' thing sparked it all off, but my Lizzie's Home email address has been positively inundated with emails from Irish and UK national lottery sites over the last two or three weeks - to the tune of several dozen a day (and this doesn't include the three or four 'widows with millions to deposit' emails). As I don't use this particular email for anything other than blogging, the only way I can figure this happened in the first place was that my email was 'lifted' from comments I've made on giveaway blog posts lately. Oftentimes, especially if (as a Blogger gal) I'm commenting on a post hosted on Wordpress or Typepad, I always include my email in my signature, just in case it doesn't show up. For the first half of the giveaways I entered I simply typed it out in full, complete with '@' and the 'dot' symbols. Duh. I wised up for the second half and wrote it lizzies-home(at)hotmail(dot)com, but I think the damage was already done by then. And yes, I've increased my spam filter as much as I can without making it 'address book only' (kind of silly when I need new blog readers to be able to get through) but the little suckers still manage to get through. What's up with that?

Hence the purpose of this post. I've opened a new email account. Clicking on the 'Email Lizzie' link at the top of the page will bring you through to the new one. If you've happened to communicate with me through lizzies-home(at)hotmail(dot)com in the past and may have saved that address in your address books, after maybe a month or so I will simply stop checking that addy and move solely to the new one. Does anyone know if you can physically delete a hotmail account? I know it goes inactive after a while, but it would be nice not to have to go play referee at all. I know the persistent spammers could simply click on the Email link themselves and hand-enter the addy into their little spambot whatsits, but I managed to avoid that prior to this recent commenting-on-giveaways run so I suspect it's not generally something they bother with. I'm no tecno-geek but there are bots or something which troll blog comments to lift full email addresses, right? Something like that anyway.

Has anyone else had an influx of spam email after the Bloggy Giveaways carnival?

Cheers,
Lizzie