email harvesters and ASCII

[StopSpam]

i got a question :

Are there any email harvester robots that convert ASCII back to email address?

i have converted all my email adresses to ASCII and i still get tons off new junkmail.

and its a new email adress so the spam must be comming from robots.

[Dreamquick]

There are two issues with ASCII anti-spam tactics;

1) If you only swap in common codes then you run the risk of providing a single point of failure which makes "decoding" the page really easy.

2) 95% of all spambots are very, very, very, dumb - the remaining % are much smarter and can easily decode an ascii "encoded" page.

Also you have to bear in mind that they might be capturing this data by other means...

(ie what is this new email address used for? is it a free webmail address such as hotmail, yahoo etc?)

- Tony

[lorax]

I get around the harvesters by using script to do a lookup based on a URL var that I pass to the script. The lookup happens at the last possible moment and is hidden from users view - even a view source won't reveal it. This in combination with a .htaccess entries has served me well so far.

[StopSpam]

yeh i had made a new yahoo.com emaila dress

meaby yahoo is spammign me ..
or someone used a tool to genarate yahoo.com email adresses.
meaby ishould try again with a none free emeila dress...

lorax.. your swcript checks to see if its is a visito comming from your site or a robot that aks for the page containing your email adress? i dont very uderstand what your script to .

[lorax]

My situation may not be directly applicable to what you're facing but what I have is a simple link to a form instead of a raw email address. In my case I have ads for clients on a page and need to provide the ability for visitors to get in touch with the advertisers via email but don't want the harvesters getting the advertiser's email addresses. SO, the form gets filled out by the visitor and submitted to a script which formats the form items and sends them out via email. The goal is accomplished and my advertisers' email addresses are protected.

[StopSpam]

Cool!

[weesnich]

Instead of only using the well known "%41"- style you can mix it with the codes for unicode like ) (decimal) or @ (hex). Until now its very sucessfull.

Modern browers understand it, but it confuses many robots (but not googlebot, fast etc.). Be prepeard for some 404's in your logfiles.