Re:Avoiding spam (Score 1)

There are many ways in which spammers harvest and generate spam messages, and not all of them require entering your e-mail address into web forms.

But still, webforms remain the main route through which an email address first gets out into the public domain. I've always thought twice before entrusting my email address to unknown forms, but you really need to give an email in most sites these days to create and activate accounts.

I've always wished we had a toolbar (like the Google/Alexa bar) which would rank the trustability of web forms. A high rank would indicate that you could type your email address without second thoughts and a low rank would mean we should close and exit, these forms are used to harvest your email for distribution.

But this idea seems to have occured to other people too(http://www.orchy.com/fg/). Nothing complicated is attempted - he will attempt to post to all forms on the web with an unique URL being submitted for every form. Then he will track the spams received for each address. He will thus rate the web forms as malicious/good depending on the number of spams received.

Sounds simple. I sincerely hope something useful is done soon as the idea seems to be novel and will be effective, if implemented properly.