Spam Email

[gmalloch]

Does having my email address on a website make that email address vulnerable to receiving spam email ie. are there robots or people trawling the internet looking for published email addresses they can use to send unsolicited email?

[dj_ajax]

Having your email address in the html code of a page makes it vulnerable to so called "spiders" that search the web for emails on sites however it is fairly easy to get around for the webmaster.

[jedda]

DJ_AJAX, tell us how please.

[dj_ajax]

How does the spider work? or how can you get around it?

[rojash]

You can do it by displaying the e-mail address as a bitmap, and encoding the link. You can do all this by hand, but I use a program called Aevita Stop Spam.

Having created your web page (including e-mail links) you just process it with this program, which automatically generates bitmap images of the address, and does the code/decode stuff for you.

[dj_ajax]

Another way is to have it link to a javascript program that accesses another notepad file or database with email addresses in

[mr_pointment]

so, dj_ajax,is there anything we could fill these files/databases with that would screw the spider?

[fo3nix]

apart from rojash's suggestion, one of the easiest things to do is to set up a contact form. i.e. you can let people email you from your website, without having to give out your email address to them. this is what I do.

[dj_ajax]

The fact that the page links to another file or database means you don't have an email link there in the actual html. Thats the way i normally do it as well fo3nix i make it with perl cgi and have the form email me from the site so that no one knows my actual email.

[leandrews]

You could just try writing out your email address. but without using any punctuation, for example:

gmalloch at hotmail dot co dot uk

I know it's not very technical, but it might help keep the spam at bay!

[fo3nix]

leandrews: the spam bots are quite wise to this sort of things now :)