Every time I’m having a discussion with a customer, the topic of email spam isn’t a rare item. It’s even more surprising learning that most small-medium business owners don’t really take into concern for the safety of their corporate emails. Imagine spending countless hours having to filter out your business email from junk email sent by spammers. How much business are you losing by spending time deleting useless emails than replying high priority emails from customers?
It’s advisable today to not list your emails on your website. Reason being is that we’ve heard countless stories of how spammers can ‘sniff’ out lone emails placed directly on websites. On the other hand, if you can’t help it and have invested in an up-to-date spam solution then there’s nothing much can be done.
But what I’d like to share with you today is a software I found online that ‘sniffs’ out email addresses on a website that could even extract them out. It’s really scary knowing such a software exists and it’s being sold to anyone who can afford it.
Fast Email Extractor Pro (FEEP) is the name of the program and I’m not sure if it’s the program that is powerful or its the websites that are insecure. Whatever the case, I think such a tool shouldn’t be sold to just about anyone. Though it could be considered a very unlikely tool for spammers, it delivers useful traits for a spammer.
I’ve tried it so far on the Visit Malaysia Cyber Campaign website and the Low Yat forums. From the experiment done, I noticed that most of the emails harvested come from the forums. Both the websites are using different forum engines; PHPBB and Invision PB. How FEEP is doing this I have no idea but just thinking about this is just worrisome.
FEEP might just be one of the the available tools from thousands more but I hope this awareness message and experiment delivers the requirement of you asking your website designers, programmers, agencies, firms and etc regarding the safety of listing your corporate email addresses on your current website.