One of the preeminent ways that spammers get ahold of email addresses is by sending automated programs out to websites to search for email addresses thereon. If your email address appears on a website, it’s a good bet that your Inbox will soon be filled with dubious offers for herbal anatomy enlargers, Norton Systemworks, and business offers from Nigeria.

Since my spam count is now larger than my legitimate email count, I’ve been looking for ways to help fix that problem. Apple’s Mail.app has good filtering, but those spammers are devious, and keep figuring out ways around it. So, I took the step today of changing up the templates on this site so that the addresses of the people who leave messages will no longer be displayed. This will probably make the biggest difference for my inbox, since I post the majority of the messages here, but it will also help keep the spammers away from the other people who participate in discussions here as well.

Thanks to Steve for his help tracking down the right templates, and to Seth and the other Conversant developers for the ability to change thousands of web pages with a few clicks.