topsites - 7:55 am on Dec 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

This has been my experience...
Please read through, the bad news comes first but it's not all bad.

First of all, nothing will stop the spambots from harvesting email addresses. Today's harvesters use sophisticated software, some with OCR-readers (Optical Character Recognition) that read image-based addresses, and url and script de-obfuscation that render even expert coding tricks useless to all but the simpler bots. Reason I know this is I got bots probing inside my cgi bin and penetrating the perl script used for sending mail via <forms> for the purpose of extracting my address. As for the scripts, harvester programmers look for the scripts used to foil their bots (such as the ones posted in this thread) for the purpose of reverse-engineering said scripts so the bot can penetrate and extract addresses the site owner thinks are safe.

After all, if you were a spammer, you wouldn't want a cheap harvester, would you?
You might be paying several hundred dollars for some 'top notch software.'

However, and this is where the good news starts, the serious trouble didn't start until I wanted some TRAFFIC.

For at least the first 2 years I got anywhere from 20 to 100-200 visitors/day or thereabouts but it was all reciprocal links and small directories and webring stuff, far away from the top of the Internet. Google hardly existed at the time, but Altavista and Yahoo and the rest of the big guys also did not know my site existed.

See, harvesters use engines to find web sites to crawl, and they find sites via the use of operator-provided keywords. Spammers assume that via the use of keywords, their spam will be targeted.
I know this because a lot of the spam I receive contains the very keywords which not only exist on my site, but show in my stats as how my visitors find me. Thus it comes as no surprise to receive spam for 'replica watches' although the keyword 'replica' actually refers to a few links I have to sites which contain Replica Kit Cars!

As a sidenote, one might think the spammers got close with the watches, but it's ALWAYS off, they are never on target with their garbage, keywords or not.

So, it turns to reason you will have no real trouble with harvesters (or the resulting spam) until such time when your site is listed in the Yahoo! directory OR for some other reason your site starts ranking on the FIRST page of results for some popular, single-word key word(s) on a high-traffic or popular engine such as Google.

Because before that, I really can't say I had spam problems... Well I thought I did, but I just hadn't experienced real spam yet.

So, do as you wish but you can always turn off emails later, I do not feel you will have problems until you develop some recognition, no offense intended.