Posted by dorayme on 03/04/07 22:17

In article <Xns98E98B70041DAarbpenyahoocom@69.28.186.121>,
Adrienne Boswell <arbpen@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Gazing into my crystal ball I observed patrick j
> <usemywebsite@googlemail.com> writing in
> news:0001HW.C210ECF000FB261AB042494F@News.Individual.Net:
>
> > Hi
> >
> > I'm just putting together a web-page onwhich I am going to include an
> > email address in a "mailto" link.
> >
> > To hide it from the spam bots I'm going to use ASCII codes for each
> > character of the email address.
> >
> > What I'm wondering is: will this work if I actually display the email
> > address in the web-page as well as put it in the href for the "mailto"
> > link?
> >
> > The reason I ask is that a human being will be able to see and even
> > copy and paste the email address from the web-page. Will a spam bot be
> > able to "see" it as well?
> >
> > TIA
> >
> >
>
> There is almost no way to keep an email address from spam-bots. I would
> say the best thing to do would be to use a "throw away" address, and set
> it for very aggressive filtering.

We had a thread a while back in which Spider Monkey gave some
impressive results of personal trials using encoding etc and no
one really challenged the fact that various masking techniques
were quite effective in practice. So I am not sure that what you
are saying is correct from a practical point of view.

I believe now in encoding email addresses and my view is that
spam bots will go for the low lying fruit and that it is worth it
to put email addresses onto higher branches.

Some purists think it is not our business and that clients should
go find email spam experts to cope with the consequences of
simple email mailto:s but I believe this is too severe and
really, just wrong.

--
dorayme

[Back to original message]