Technology Notebook

Spam::Avoiding address harvesting from your website

I loath people who use robots to walk through websites gleaning e-mail addresses. To help prevent it, some say, you can hide the e-mail address itself and instead calling a script to redirect mailto links. However how soon until the spammers read these articles and rewritten code to guess at e-mail link redirector parameters. (or recognize implementations copied or very close to the examples provided by the helpful people who gave us the information.)


http://jamesthornton.com/software/redirect-mailto.html
http://jamesthornton.com/software/graphic@.html

I like the above ideas best, however there are some other possibilities.

Many say we should "munge" your address by writing addresses something like:

datacomguy -at- bigfoot -dot- com

I see this all over the place, but let's face it: most people out there are barely able to deal with such complex ideas as "click that little address and it will send me an e-mail." Expecting people to read your instructions, understand what to do, and use their keyboard and fingers to type your e-mail address into their e-mail software will be excluding 90% of the civilized computer using world who are either too thick or just too lazy to do it.

I've also seen some who turn *all* e-mail address links into graphics and link each of them to their own custom response form. This is going a bit far and is a bit more labor intensive. This method does have the advantage of being able *totally* hide your e-mail address. Sender's will have a much less "feature rich" experience sending you e-mail using a form. Making a paragraph break or a bulleted list will be difficult or impossible. And they are likely to hit the send button impatiently one or several times more while the next page is rendering. Or they might wonder if "it went through" and send you the same message again.