I’m tired of spam emails flooding my inbox, so I decided to take inspiration from Kev’s approach. I noticed that many of the spam messages were being sent to the email address I published on my legally required imprint.

To combat this, I now include a random email address on my imprint page, which I can update regularly. In my mailbox, I’ve set up a Sieve filter rule to reject any emails sent to the same subdomain but addressed to a different email.

This way, whenever I notice an increase in spam, I can easily update the contact address and adjust the filter rule.

To avoid confusing legitimate senders, the rejection message returned to the sender’s server (and typically forwarded to the sender as well) includes instructions on where to find the current email address or alternative ways to contact me.

Here’s hoping this strategy works!

I have a question for the IndieWeb community: What can we do against Webmention spam, except filter it out, when it fails validation? I receive hundreds of invalid Webmentions a day, and even using a filtering DNS server doesn’t seem to help much. But I also don’t want to waste network traffic to access all those spam sites. Is there any good block list I can check first before doing the request for validation? I thought about Akismet, but the API has no such option to only check the submitted URL.

I think I have finally figured out how to filter out spam almost completely with my contact form. Since I use BunnyCDN for MailyGo instead of Cloudflare, as I do for my websites, the number of spam submissions increased first (since BunnyCDN doesn’t block bots), despite using a honeypot. But now I have implemented a blacklist function with “forbidden” words (which contains the words “casino” and “gambling” by default) and haven’t received any spam since. Sometimes the solution to a complex problem can be so simple.