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Posted by Philip on 11/26/50 11:51
In article <e7vuim$2bj$1$830fa17d@news.demon.co.uk>,
"Richard Cornford" <Richard@litotes.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Philip wrote:
> <snip>
> > I've been testing this with some spamtrap email addresses,
> > and it appears to work quite well (but not perfectly).
> <snip>
>
> So it doesn't occur to you that the software used by spammers will
> evolve to be the most effective for the task? As soon as you admit that
> what you are doing is not perfect you are admitting that their exist
> e-mail address gathering techniques that are significantly superior to
> those currently in common use. Give it time and those techniques will be
> the ones in common use so all you may be doing by taking an approach
> that 'mostly works' at present is guaranteeing yourself future
> maintenance work to mitigate for the changing nature of the e-mail
> address extracting software.
Richard,
I disagree. I think spammers are after the low-hanging fruit that is
unobfuscated email addresses, and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of
that now or in the foreseeable future. You're right that spam harvesting
programs could conceivably evolve to handle obfuscated addresses, but I
see very little pressure for them to do so.
If you disagree, that's your opinion and I'm not going to try to tell
you it's wrong. But one thing is for sure: right now, obfuscating one's
email address will foil more email harvesters than not obfuscating. I
believe (and am trying to assemble real data to so I can rely on
something besides intuition here) that using a Javascript-based method
is more secure than simple obfuscation, even allowing for evolution of
email harvesting programs. I think it is unlikely that email harvesters
will ever develop the ability to interpret Javascript, not because it is
too difficult to do but because it would be resource-intensive, a little
dangerous, and would have a very low ROI.
Nevertheless, obfuscation has an advantage in that it doesn't rely on
Javascript or on the author having the ability to offer a contact form
in the event that Javascript isn't available on the client.
Cheers
--
Philip
http://NikitaTheSpider.com/
Bulk HTML validation, link checking and more
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