| Protect Your Email Address from Spam Bots. |
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Do you want to protect the email address used on your website from being harvested by spambots? You need to have a "mailto:" link on your site so that people can contact you when they have a comment or question. This requires putting your email address on the page. The problem is that one of the main methods that spammers use to obtain email addresses is to send a robot out to the internet whose primary purpose is to find email addresses. The spambot does this by looking at the HTML coding that the browser uses to show the webpage. It then saves the email address it finds after "mailto:". The two most common methods of "hiding" the email address: * Munging. This technique doesn't use a link at all. The email address is disguised by using words for the symbols. Example: janedoe AT yahoo DOT com * Encoding. The most common code used is standard ASCII code. Each letter or symbol in the email address is replaced by its equivalent. A simplified address a @ b.com would be coded as: & #97; & #64; & #98; & #46; & #99; & #111; & #109; ( spaces added to prevent your browser from printing the actual letters ) One can still use the mailto: link, since the browser recognizes this code, and prints out the actual address on the webpage. But these methods no longer work. Alas - the spambots have become more intelligent. The hackers who teach them have programmed them to recognize these two methods, and decode them. These two methods by no means exhaust the possibilities. A Google search on "hide email address" turns up over two million results. Even discounting duplicate methods, there are undoubtedly quite a few ingenious techniques available. All right then, what do I do? Without going through all of the Google entries, I can predict beyond a reasonable doubt that the method I use myself does a better job of protecting your email address than any other. How can I be so sure? Because I doubt that any hacker would have the time or skill to write a bot that would allow him to grab my email address -- it's that well hidden! The method I devised hides the email address off the webpage itself. Not only that, the javascript file containing the address is even in a completely different folder that's not accessible to anyone - just to the website itself. But even though it cannot be seen anywhere in the HTML code of the page, it DOES magically appear on the page itself, where anyone can see it - except a robot! Are you convinced? So-called "experts" have told me that it can't be done. Well, take a look for yourself. Just visit my webpage shown in the next paragraph, and you'll see how it works. About the Author: Visit the author's website, Professor's Coding Corner for useful code snippets and tutorials on various aspects of web programming. In particular, the article, Stop Spambots will show you the best way to protect your website. |