Journal yintercept's Journal: Web design tip 1,837 4
Obfuscating your email address can help reduce the amount of spam that you receive. For example entering your email address as "name (at) domain.com" gives people the information that they need to contact you, while thwarting the spam bots.
It is also extremely effective to use an image with your email address name.
I've noticed several sites doing silly things like making the email address close to the same color as the background.
Hiding your email address on an interior pages does not thwart spam harvesters. They can spider a web site more effectively than your customers.
Making your email address hard for people to read does not make it harder for email harvesters to read. It actually will reduce the number of legitimate leads to fake leads.
Some people use the image idea, but they still have their email address in a mailto link. No, that does not thwart the email address harvester. You do not want anything to appear on your site in the form name@domain.com . Spam harvesters simply pick up on that pattern. If you need to put out an email address, I have had success obfuscating the address with javascript. The javascript does a document.write('domain'+'@'+'.'+'com'). This breaks up the tell tale domain name pattern and lets you have a live link.
Anyway, I just came from a web page that made the text of the email address really really small and almost the same color as the background.
Nice try. I would not bet on that technique in reducing spam.
It is also extremely effective to use an image with your email address name.
I've noticed several sites doing silly things like making the email address close to the same color as the background.
Hiding your email address on an interior pages does not thwart spam harvesters. They can spider a web site more effectively than your customers.
Making your email address hard for people to read does not make it harder for email harvesters to read. It actually will reduce the number of legitimate leads to fake leads.
Some people use the image idea, but they still have their email address in a mailto link. No, that does not thwart the email address harvester. You do not want anything to appear on your site in the form name@domain.com . Spam harvesters simply pick up on that pattern. If you need to put out an email address, I have had success obfuscating the address with javascript. The javascript does a document.write('domain'+'@'+'.'+'com'). This breaks up the tell tale domain name pattern and lets you have a live link.
Anyway, I just came from a web page that made the text of the email address really really small and almost the same color as the background.
Nice try. I would not bet on that technique in reducing spam.
does "mailto:user@host.tld" work? (Score:2)
I bet it works pretty well if the "mailto" is also spelled with a numeric entity -- or do spam harvester bots decode ampersand-crosshatch entity codes?
Somebody must have tested this already by putting such links on a popular web page somewhere and seeing if the obfusticated addresses started getting any spam. But, for the obvious reasons, I
Re:does "mailto:userhosttld" work? (Score:1)
I did not take this approach as I suspect that many of the spam harvesters evolved from HTML harvesters. In which case they would urldecode the email address.
The Javascript mechanism can mask the entire mailto link.
The more I think of it. I suspect most spam harvesters would run urldecode()
Re:does "mailto:userhosttld" work? (Score:2)
Re:does "mailto:userhosttld" work? (Score:2)
I had been thinking that a server side script might be in order. The script would require word verification and record the users IP. That still would not stop manual email harvesters.