If a manufacturer offers the ability to contact them via email then they should ensure they have someone handling this and if they are getting too many junk emails to deal with it then implement a contact form.
I completely agree and have argued this position for decades.
[The following is not specifically directed at you Liz. It's mostly for those who aren't aware, and perhaps, if someone at Earthroamer is lurking about, they'll take it to heart.]
We, "in the business", have known about the problem of email address harvesting for decades. At this point, there are hundreds of thousands of bots up and running and crawling the web at any given moment; as well as many other methods of harvesting - such as grabbing all the addresses from an individual's contact list; and spammers sell their databases of collected addresses to each other on an open market. Once an email address gets into a spammer database, it will NEVER be removed.
The worst case I personally have seen, was an email server with over one-hundred email boxes each receiving over twenty-thousand spams per day. They had published their entire company contact list on their web site, including everyone's email address as a clickable mailto: link. Someone in their sales department had thought it a grand idea. The IT department objected, but was overruled. At the point where I was called in, the only thing to do, was to implement a very strict (spam nazi) server-side anti-spam filter
[*] and try to keep a smile on my face as everyone in the company started (loudly) complaining. (As a hired gun consultant called in to deal with the mess, I didn't care how loudly they complained. The CEO was authorizing my checks, and as long as he was happy, the rest would simply have to get over it.)
These days, NOT implementing a contact form is regarded as a novice mistake for a web designer to make. Anyone who puts a mailto: link on their web site is just begging to be spammed into the ninth circle of hell. Unfortunately, there are a lot of novices out there representing themselves as experts. (Which has always been a rampant problem at all levels in the IT field.) Many companies have shot themselves in the foot by trusting an "expert" who was nothing of the sort.
But the reason such things happen is that people running companies are generally not, themselves, IT experts. They simply must put their trust in someone to get the job done. And how are they to know who to trust? They don't. All they can do is give it a shot and hope they don't lose a toe as a result.
Again, I'm not acting as an apologist; this is simply the nature of the beast.
The fix to Earthroamer's current problem is easy. (And unfortunately, even today, often needed.)
Create a new email account to receive contact emails.
Implement a Contact Us page with code to keep the recipient email address hidden.
Delete the thoroughly compromised "info@" email address, which is beyond any doubt in thousands of spammer databases and flagged as a "good" email address. ("Good" meaning; confirmed that actual human eyes will see the spam.)
[*] In case any email admins are watching: My preferred tool for this is ASSP. It's an SMTP proxy that watches incoming SMTP connections, analyzes the incoming message as it passes through, does a Beyesian comparison against "known spam" and "known not-spam" databases, and if it decides the incoming message looks more like spam than not-spam, cuts off the SMTP connection with a reject message. Thus the incoming spam never does finish getting delivered to the server and never ends up in any mailboxes on the recipient server.
One of the few truly excellent free, open source softwares in the world.
http://www.magicvillage.de/~Fritz_Borgstedt/assp/0003D91C-8000001C/
