Why RSS might not replace e-mail just yet

Like many Webloggers, Adam Kalsey lets readers comment on his posts. And like a growing number of Webloggers who allow comments, he's seen a dramatic rise in the number of comment spams - from people who include their URLs in the hopes of increasing their Google "PageRanks" (since Google uses links as one measure of how relevant a particular page is).

"Instead of one every month or so, I’m getting comment spam almost every day now. In talking to Brad, he pointed out a scary scenario that would have bots crawling looking for sites to send spam trackback pings to."

Kalsey plans to fight back, though - he's begun thinking of ways to limit such comment spam, for example, by prohibiting posts from the same IP address every X seconds or even just letting blog authors change the names of the comment form fields (since some spambots would look for those field names).

Given the never-ending arms race between e-mail users and spammers, though, this doesn't bode well for the use of RSS as an alternative to SMTP-based e-mail - unless you decide never to subscribe to the RSS equivalent of mailing lists.