Yes, it’s finally happened. The spammers have won.

After more than 5 years of strong resistance, I have given up and removed my email address from every one of the 352 pages on this website.

Why? Because the litany of spam messages I was receiving, which ranged from Nigerian financial deals to cheap Canadian prescriptions has become too much to bare. It has come to the point where I am receiving up to 20 messages a day, sometimes more. If I don’t check my email on a daily basis, it overfills. And I don’t like being a slave to my email, nor wasting hours writing more ‘rules’ for my email server to obey, in a vein attempt to filter out some of the rubbish.

For those of you who’ve been hiding in a cave somewhere these last few years, spam is the term used to describe all those ‘junk’ emails which get set around, advertising websites and services, often with less-than-reputable intentions. They are sent by computers called “spambots” which trawl the internet looking for email addresses to ‘harvest’. Each time they find an email address on a website, they add it to their database and send it messages, or spam. It is similar technology to what the search engines use to catalogue the internet, except there is no good use for spam.

To get around this, I now require visitors to use the A.D. Online Feedback Form to contact me. This is a way that they can send me a message without having to use their email software, and without me having to worry about spambots being able to harvest my email address.

It is a pity, however, because I personally find it very frustrating when I visit a website, to have no email address to send correspondence to. Especially if the form that is provided is too small to include a proper message. But I have ensured that the form provided on this site is big, and that there are multiple ‘Contact Me’ links to it on each page of this website leading to it, so it is easy for you to contact me, should you wish to do so.

One day, an effective remedy for this problem may be available. Until then, this is what we webmasters are forced to do.