Protect yourself from spam! (theory)

twister

twister

Howdy
I have a theory on how you can protect yourself from spam. (if you don't already know)

Don't put your email address anywhere on your website.

I have created a few email address. All pretty simple. Only one is receiving spam and it's the only one that i really don't use. The difference is that the one that has started getting spam is on a website as a direct link. So email bots go out and scan websites and picked up that email.

Now on another part of my site i have a php form that, upon submission, gets sent to my main email address. That is not being picked up from these bots.

So if you want to protect yourself from spam don't put your email on your website. Use a form.

Info for those who didn't know.
 
It's amazing how having your email address on a site can increase your spam - I speak from experience.

I had a load of email addresses on one of my sites (support, feedback, etc). As a result each one got scanned and all of a sudden I'm getting around 100 spams a day. As I had used so many different addresses on the site most of it was duplicated. Arggggghhhhhh!

I had to change my email forwarding to kill all the addresses I had used (send the emails nowhere!) and remove all traces of an email address from the site.

I'm a lot wiser now! ;o)
 
if you need to put your email addy on a site (like for webmastering it) save it as a .bmp and low reso plus in a weird font.

formmail is good, if you don't have to show your email in the html code.

theorically writing your email in format myemail at mydomain dot com works as well.

also, i see some use their email addys in the forum sigs ... they are no safer than other places in web.
 
If you don't put your email address in the home page, you will not get too much spam.
 
Truthfully I have my email address on several different parts of my site. However I get very little mail into these addresses.

The fact is that having you own domain name makes you very public. Anyone can look up not only your email address, but also your home address and phone number.

All in all, I get a lot more spam because of my domain name than because of email links on my site. Then again, my site is small, personal, and I activly try to keep it out of search engines.
 
Oh... There are lots of tips on how to use JavaScript email links instead of A HREF "Mailto" links.

Search both Google and this site to find those...
 
The only true way to stop spammers is to charge for e-mail. I am totally serious. Even if e-mail only costed a penny to send, how much would it cost to bulk mail 10 million spams? ;)

Of course, I'm just flame-baiting myself. :p
 
Image solution is simple, convenient, elegant. Although the exampel given above is totally unreadable !

What about mail actionscripts in Flash ? I don't think they get read by spambots.
 
the images HAVE to be hard to read. If it's in a jpg or gif, and on a readable font like arial, times, helvetica etc - the sapmbots CAN READ it. so make the picture that weird that a HUMAN being can decipher it. or use in the picture the format myemail at mydomain dot com. the example above is intentionally hard to read. believe me or not - the things like myemailREMOVETHISIFYOUANSWER@mydomain.com or myemail@removethis.mydomain.com etc don't work always because there are really people who can't understand the instructions = they complain the email doesn't get sent..
 
Originally posted by twister
or encrypt your email address

http://www.advancedwebpromotions.com/email_encrypt.asp

So that link isn't the best It works but unfortunately subscribes you to their email list :(

There's got to be a better one but I'm lazy at the moment to look.
Click to expand...

lol! That's some encryption algorithm! They just used the straight ascii code equivalents for the letters! (http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/c/ascii-table.html) Why wouldn't bots be able to be adapted and pick up on this? :confused:

I'd be really suspicious anyway about spam protection from a site called "advancedwebpromotions.com" and requires you to join a list to get the service!

I don't see how encryption could work for posting e-mail addresses -- if it's something you wanted publicly accessible to real readers then you would have to provide a public key. If you do that then the spam bots just look for the key and you're back to the same problem, except you're trying to protect the key instead of the address, and you've just made it more of a hassle for yourself and your viewers, and spam bots don't seem to mind a few extra loops to run through as much as humans. ;)

Is there some other way for encrypted e-mail addresses to work?
 
I was thinking the same thing. I was just hoping someone else would come along and prove me right or wrong.
 
How about using javascript to document write the email link into the page - but rather than doing it in one clean hit, write it out in bits so a robot wouldn't understand the individual bits even if it did look at the javscript itself.

Something like....

function someFunction()
{
document.write('<a href="mailto:');
document.write('username');
document.write('@');
document.write('domain');
document.write(.);
document.write(com);

etc. etc.
}

And then calling this in the page? Stoopid I know, but would it work to confuse a 'bot?

Personally I prefer a web form approach myself. ;o)
 
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