This afternoon, another first; the email address for this blog was spammed by a 419 spam (you know, “I’m from Nigeria and want to give you 16 Bazillion dollars?”).

I’m not certain, but I think I know how. In the XML file is the email address of the author post…now in this file the email address is “escaped,” that is, looks like:

cfs_blog@lofcom.com

After some experimentation, I discovered that some aggrigators, when using “Add to Blog,” will actually unescape the escaped characters…so although it would be difficult to harvest from the XML file directly, any reposting of the information in the file would display the address in-the-clear, allowing any harvester software to pluck the address with no-muss-no-fuss.

I’m not yet prepared to change that address (although I will if I continue to receive spam through it), but I am going to be rewriting the XML file to no longer send the author’s email address in the syndicated feed. So far as I can tell, it isn’t required so there’s no reason to send it out routinely.