[_] Making email addresses spambot-resistant
Tim Beadle
tim.beadle at gmail.com
Thu Oct 5 15:41:04 BST 2006
Hi,
We've lost a customer because the email address in his directory
listing got picked up by spambots. We (naively) put addresses up in
plaintext, perhaps because we have a decent spam filter in place here.
I came across this [1], which needs JavaScript and is no good for
batch conversion of addresses, but I remember this stuff being an arms
race and spambots' parsing improving to a point where techniques like
this are fairly pointless.
Any thoughts on reducing the risk? Obviously contact forms are the
ideal (as long as they're bot-proof themselves) but we need a quick,
easy and minimal change that will at least help a bit.
Cheers,
Tim
[1] http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/obfuscator.php
We've lost a customer because the email address in his directory
listing got picked up by spambots. We (naively) put addresses up in
plaintext, perhaps because we have a decent spam filter in place here.
I came across this [1], which needs JavaScript and is no good for
batch conversion of addresses, but I remember this stuff being an arms
race and spambots' parsing improving to a point where techniques like
this are fairly pointless.
Any thoughts on reducing the risk? Obviously contact forms are the
ideal (as long as they're bot-proof themselves) but we need a quick,
easy and minimal change that will at least help a bit.
Cheers,
Tim
[1] http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/obfuscator.php