You can imagine how delighted I was to get an email from Mr Eedirs Adam, addressed to the managing director. Since it’s my personal site, I presume that’s me. Anyway, he was formerly a personal aide to one of the ministers of Sierra Leone, and … what the heck, he can tell you himself.

I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO COME AWAY WITH A REASONABLE SUM OF MONEY AND I HAVE TENDENCY TO INVEST THIS MONEY IN A COMPANY WITH A GOOD LINE OF PRODUCTS LIKE YOUR OWN COMPANY WITH POTENTIALS FOR A GOOD CAPITAL RETURNS;

Darn! I’m not a company. Does this mean that I’m unable to take advantage of this no doubt unique offer? Because it certainly sounds like I’d benefit!

IN VIEW OF YOUR PARTICIPATION, I AM READY TO GIVE YOU A GOOD NEGOTIABLE PERCENTAGE FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE, OR BETTER STILL COMMIT IT INTO JOINT VENTURE PROJECTS. BE ASSURED THAT YOU STAND NO RISK OF ANY KIND AS THE FUNDS BELONG TO ME ONLY

No risk of any kind? Well, that sounds almost too good to be true. But of course, there’s a reason for that. It is. I’ve received an email from a dirty rotten spammer who just wants to fleece money out of my bank accounts. Interestingly enough, I hardly ever used to receive any spam at all, at least until June this year, because I’ve always been very careful not to publish my email account on the internet.

Until of course, I commented on WCAG 2.0 over at the W3C site. Becuase they helpfully publish the entire comments thread, so other people can view it, including the email addresses in a poorly protected manner. So I’d just like to thank them for publishing my email address where any spam bot can get a hold of it and fill my inbox with this shite.

Thanks, W3C, thanks a lot. I mean, I know I was critical about WCAG 2.0, but is it too much to expect that an organisation who sets and publishes the standards for the internet are aware that there are email harvesting bots out there and protects the email addresses of people who comment?

Granted, my email address is munged (the domain part uses the @ type of encoding), but this sort of munging is relatively simplistic and we know some spam bots translate it — even before now. I appreciate that people need to be able to reply to comments, but could this either be done through a reply to comment form? Or by using the css obfusaction technique? I know this prevents the use of mailto links, but frankly I don’t care about that. Someone who wants to reply to me that much can type in my email address. If you can’t be bothered to type in my email address, why should I be bothered with what you’ve got to say?

So please, W3C, protect your commenters, protect your mailing lists. Not all of us are companies with firewalls, unlimited bandwidth and teams of people cutting out spam. Otherwise don’t be to surprised that not many people comment.