Re: Dealing with Spam and other canned meats

From: Steve Werby <steve-lists_at_befriend.com>
Date: Mon 05 Aug 2002 12:44:54 -0500

"Jim Namaste" <jim.namaste_at_netpartners-marketing.com> wrote:
> If you send an email to results_at_siteup.com it will send you
> back an encoded version of the email you used, which you can
> then cut and paste for your web page.

Not bad, Jim, but sadly eventually even code like that will be recognized by
all email harvesting software. In fact, it took me 2 minutes to write and
test PHP code that extracts the email address from the HTML code siteup.com
sent me. See http://www.befriend.com/emaildecoder.php to try it out and
check out the PHP source code. siteup.com simply randomly replaces
individual characters with their ASCII equivalents. Right now, such a small
percentage of web pages contain obfuscated email addresses, but as the
percentage increases, software will be improved upon to recognize common
obfuscation techniques and grab the addresses. It really isn't that
difficult. Personally, I recommend avoiding mailto tags all together since
it's trivial to implement free Perl/PHP/ASP code to allow email to be sent
without revealing an address, display email addresses as images, add a
intermediate step requiring a password to get to a page listing email
addresses or use your own obfuscation techniques to make it difficult to
impossible for automated email harvesting software to extract email
addresses from your pages. Of course, if your alternatives are limited to
text mailto tags, all ASCII code mailto tags and combined text/ASCII mailto
tags definitely go with the latter.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/







Received on Mon Aug 05 2002 - 12:44:54 CDT