Hiding web contact e-mail addresses from the evil guys

What is the latest in hiding your contact information on
your website?

I put a link to a friend and now he is getting a thousand
spams a day.

Best regards
mark

 

Edit the whole link into raw html. Just search in Google for email encoder...You'll find it. Works brilliantly.

 

http://www.metaprog.com/samples/encoder.htm

Check this one

 

Yea Spam is a BIG pain.

Um there are a couple of tricks. One is to just write out the address like:

contact[at]yoursite.com

or

there is a JavaScript version where you can seperate each part of the e-mail and than have Javascript put it together.

eg.

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
var name = "contact";
var domain = "yoursite.com";
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + name + '@' + domain + '\">');
document.write(name + '@' + domain + '</a>');
// --></script>

Code (markup):

This produces the same HTML link but you won't have any bots spam you.

Of course there are spammers that spam by hand (i.e. find an e-mail address and add it to the list) and you really can't solve that problem.

But the JavaScript approach should cut out all spam.

Skinny

 

Use a (secure) contact form instead, that's the best way to avoid spam.

 

I've used:

http://www.kenric.com/AntiSpambotMailto.html

for a number of years now. I mostly use it for clients anymore. For my own sites, I use a web mail form.

A golden rule of thumb...don't ever use your good email address for directory submissions. I create forward email addys for submissions and usually within a week, they are getting spammed with replica watchs and penis power pills. After that, I delete the forward and create a new one.

 

I was being spammed too much.

I tired putting up my email address with the "REMOVEME" in it, but spammers just removed it. I think automatically.

So now, I have a contact form, and that form emails me the user's communication.

later,

tom

 

Use an auto-generate image, robots can't read images and by-hand spammers cannot use mouse-select-copy-and-paste

http://www.signgenerator.org/txt2img

 

Using a contact form with image verification would be the best way.
Or you can display the email in an image instead of text or html...
Bye

 

I use contact forms, but I still get spam. I don't even bother trying to fight it anymore. What's the use? Deleting it is easy enough.

 

I wrote an article on an AJAX technique. Some liked the idea, others saw issues. But it's easy to use and I haven't seen evidence of spam yet.

http://15daysofjquery.com/safer-mailto-links/8/

 

1000 spams a day is no joke, it completely screws up your
morning, since hidden in the 1000 spams is 100 legitimate
e-mails.

And Monday mornings are a total loss.

 

Thanks for all your help, friends. A lot of great
ideas.

 

IMO just use a PHP, or any dynamic language, to get the information from a form, then make some server side checking, if alright then go ahead and use a mail(), if not then just don't send it, better off just tell the spammer ypu sent it when you actually didn't. . That should give him something to chew on .

 

i use the good ol' method. i post my contact info (email address) as a pic.

 

I'd have to suggest using sneakemail.com. You create a free account there, and then you generate a completely random email address for wherever you need to use one.

They have an example of how to use it here.

 

I suspect that as long as there are plenty of unprotected email addys out there, this method should work well. My two issues are

1. It does not degrade gracefully. Without javascript, it doesn't allow a link. This is a serious accessibility issue that I have no idea how to circumvent given the requirements.
   
2. A DOM inspector, such as Firefox's, clearly displays the value of href. I think it would be trivial to harvest the mailto: links should the cost of processing the page with javascript become less than the value of the addy.

2¢ worth.

cheers,

gary

 

Gary,
You're correct... that method I wrote about does not degrade gracefully. I mention that in the article and it's just a choice that a web designer could make. Some value accessibility over all else. Some are willing to sacrifice some accessibility for the benefits a technique like this provides. There's no right answer for everyone... just a choice.

As for the second point, in my experience, spammers are lazy just like everyone else. There are plenty of weak mailto links and insecure forms for them to attack without scouring the internet manually. For that matter, writing foo [AT] bar.com on a webpage with no link is just as susceptible.

 

I use Javascript as well, it works a treat..

 

yeah javascript is always good
thats what i use