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Ok, pretty standard stuff. I've spent quite a bit of time on this, but have received a complaint from someone who says they are plagued by spam and that I have produced an excellent source of email addresses for spammers. From my pages spammers might have access to 150+ email address contained with a few inter-connected web pages.
Now the obvious question, what can I do (if anything) to protect the email addresses without loosing the limited, but none the less useful functionality I've just described?
One idea might be to create a database using PHP and MySQL, but I nothing about either of these and in any case, would it be a spam proof solution?
EVO
<script language=javascript>
<!--
function mref(mine) {
temp = "name@" +
"domain.com?" +
"subject=My%20Inquiry";
temp = "mailto:" + temp;
mine.href=temp;
}
// -->
</script>
It is used as follows:
<a name="posse" href="#" onmousedown="mref(this)">
anchor link text or image goes here
</a>
This forum helped my work out a few bugs so that it is supported by multiple browsers but it seems to work now. Breaking the email address up into several lines (i.e., breaking up
name@domain.com?subject=My Inquiry) also seems to help as it makes detecting and deecoding an email address more difficult.
Unfortunately there are work arounds. In particular if you activate the link then the email address gets placed in the anchor value and can be read but that is a multistep process and requires some specific knowledge on the part of the would be spammer. This is just a hardcoded example. If you have multiple addresses and links then you will have to expand the mref function and its use. In any case it is fairly simple, loads quickly and seems to work (for now).
Hope this information is useful!
On the site, the email link says "Contact this individual" or something like that, and the URL goes to a contact form, which might be linked like this:
example.com/contact.src?ID=7
At that point the form knows to send this inquiry to the email address associated with ID=7 in the database. That happens in the form processing, and the public user (nor the spambot) never sees an email address, nor can they find it in the source code.
I wonder though, am I bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted?
I wonder though, am I bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted?
I think the best answer to that is both yes and no.
My brother once had an e-mail address on the web site for his band, and spam was constantly sent to it. (The address was not given out anywhere else.) After he replaced the e-mail address with an image, he stopped receiving spam within about two months.
am I bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted?If the addresses have been scanned and people are are already getting spam because of it...then, yes. All those addresses are already in a collection of "1,000,000 pre-approved addresses" and on sale to the beginner spammer for $9.95. Now it is time for you to implement some good Bayesian filters on your machines. Once a set of addresses makes it into rotation there's little you can do to stop it unfortunately.
If you can control the email server behavior, you can send all email directed to the trashed accounts to the :blackhole account, if you have one, thus saving a bunch of new spam filter rules. That's what I do.
Wiz
Wiz
