How to foul a spambot...

[littleman]

One way is to cloak your email address. That is what this little script does. It will work on most email harvesters. Call it via ssi where you would be putting your email address. Something like this:

<a href="mailto:<!--#exec cgi="email.pl" -->"><!--#exec cgi="email.pl" --></a>

Here is the script:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#your path to perl
$email = '[e-mail]'; #your email
 print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
if (
 $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} =~ /^Mozilla/ && 
 ($ENV{'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'} or $ENV{'HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'=~ /gzip/})
 ){
 print $email;
 }
##There are a couple of bots that use a local referer to try to spoof scripts, 
##so you *may* want to comment out this elsif 
elsif ($ENV{'HTTP_REFERER' =~/$ENV{'SERVER_NAME'}/ }){
print $email;
}
else {
$email =~ s/\@/_\'AT\'_/;
$email =~ s/\./_\'D0T\'_/;
print $email;
}

Of course you could also adapt it to work from within a script as a subroutine.

[ggrot]

Another interesting thing to do if you run the mail server for a domain is to return a special email address to bots and only bots. You could return something like [e-mail] where the ip of the bot requesting the page is 123.456.789.012. Generally a spammer will be very careful about hiding behind open relay servers and the such when sending spam, but may not always be so careful when harvesting email addresses. When the spam comes in, you'll know the ip address of the harvester bot and you can send the isp a nice message or ban it from ever accessing your site again, etc.

[Key_Master]

This is an example [banbots.com] of an e-mail/url cloaking script I've been working on. It's not perfect but there is only so much you can do. It is very difficult to protect something that was (in theory) made to be public.

Littleman, don't forget Opera users :):

$ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} =~ /^Mozilla¦^Opera/ &&

[volatilegx]

ggrot,

You are my hero! That's a great idea!