The volume of spam email arriving here is growing every day. Our web site log files show that most of the spam results from the spambots. We are visited by spambots every month. Spambots are robot webcrawlers that follow links to almost every web page and record any mailto tags. Mailto is the command that allows you to click on an email address and have the software provide an email form that is already addressed.

To avoid the spambots, we are removing our mailto tags. That means that soon there will be no clickable email addresses at this site. Alas, we are already known by many spammers.

But we still want to hear from you! Making it possible for you to find us is a primary purpose of this site. So we are asking you to fill out your own email forms instead of just clicking on our email addresses:

We are changing our site so that email addresses are are published only as graphics. We trust that you will use them, and we hope they remain invisible to the spambots. Thanks for your understanding and help.

If you are interested, here is our program for managing spam once is has been mailed to us.

1. First, we use shareware called POPmonitor to review all of our email before we download it from the server of the our Internet provider. POPmonitor allows us to flag all known spammers as well as trusted correspondents. If you use a Macintosh, you may want to try it: the website is www.vechtwijk.nl/dev/ and the author is Leo Makkinje.

2. We do read some ezines and emails that have hooks to web sites. As a policy, we read those offline so that these documents cannot communicate with their servers while we are reading. It means that we don't see any of the graphics or ads, but we don't have their marketing department recording what we are doing either.

3. And now we are removing the mailto tags at our web site. We are sorry to remove this convenient function.