I'd like to make it pretty simple to send email to my provocateuse dealio (BTW, Dreamhost has been beyond great for them, and they get more traffic than I'd dreamed possible), but I'm getting torrents of spam, since I have simple mailto links in the HTML.

I want to change the submission addresses, so at least the spam will bounce around somewhere else--but "provocateuse" is a bitch of a word that I'd rather not have people retype. Am I SOL? I can't think of any way to make it machine readable, but not, you know, machine readable.

Well I don't know what to call it, but set up a Gmail address. They have best freakin spam filters I've every encountered. You will get almost no spam in your inbox, and while you will have to check your spam filter for false positives, there won't be many.

Gmail have had a million and a half (okay, perhaps I mean ten) false positives for me lately. But I guess I could forward them to a gmail address and then grab them back from there.

I did some reading up on obfuscation, but it's so hard to tell which ones the spammers have rendered useless.

Thing is, mostly my emails are going to be "Trent Reznor is HAWT!!!!" and have six image attachments. It's a miracle my current filters catch any, but don't catch too many.

Yeah, that is bit harder to filter.

One other possibility. could you put your address with some extraneous stuff in the mailto?

hotpictureERASETHIS@myaddressDELETETHIS.com

with instructions. I imagine most people will be able to edit the "to" line in the email do change it to a valid address, and while some robots can too, not most.

I'm going to test the Gmail thing for a week or two, and if that doesn't pan out use the "delete me" in addition to some code obfuscation.

There has to be a point at which they don't care, right?

Pfft. Who am I kidding?

Re: The flash thing. I actually like the idea that somebody on AppleRumors came up with - one that's 32 GB of Flash, one that's a 160 GB 1.8" hard drive. Same price. Pick lighter, more durable, thinner, and better battery life, or pick much more space.

I'd be really, really torn. All my music fits fine on 32 GB of flash, but not much space for delicious video. I'd have to weight the options carefully.

ita - you could always set up an email form with a CAPTCHA thingie. You lose some of the simple, but you won't get any (or very little) spam.

I hate CAPTCHA. 1/3 of the time I seem to get it wrong myself.

I liked the idea of code that browsers rendered but had stray stuff in the HTML that'd misdirect bots. But I figure the next step in spam evolution is CSS2 compliance.

I lurve my gmail. Especially the part where I can chat with other gmailers while I'm at work. But aside from that I love how it remembers the email address of everyone I've ever emailed so if I can recall just a few letters in their addy it will give me a drop-down of choices. I love how I can search my mail or the web right from the home page and that it never permanently deletes anything. I love that my top few contacts are always in a list to the left so I can simply hover over their name and choose to email or (if they have gmail) chat with them.

But, but, integrated advertising! Lack of privacy! Just me, then?