[ale] e-mail address harvesting from web pages

[Christopher Bergeron]

John, I've had good success (thus far) by visually obfuscating my email 
address my website.  Something to the effect of:
cbergeron [at] somedomain [dot] NOSPAM com is what I currently use.  A 
reader will most likely be able to easily figure out the email address, 
and some easier obfuscation on the "mailto:" anchor tag will give your 
less informed readers a little bit of a lead in how to send you email.  
You'll ultimately come down to a user intellect level with your email 
address.  By making your email address so obvious that any idiot can use 
it, you'll open yourself up to machines that can do the same.  By 
providing a layer of required human intellect, you may isolate the 
lesser IQ'd individuals (ala, you can't use a true mailto: anchor), but 
you'll make it more difficult for harvesters to email you as well...

Just my .02 pfenning -
-CB





John Mills wrote:

>ALErs -
>
>On reading a recent Consumer Reports article on spam, one person whose 
>e-mail I post on an organization's web site asked that I either take some 
>measures to impede harvesting addresses from our web site, or that I 
>remove his address. He suggested a graphic image instead of text.
>
>I am concerned that redoing text pages as graphics will cause me more work 
>(though not overwhelmingly more, as I only update this fram annually), and 
>that its legibility would depend greatly on each viewer's browser setup.
>
>I suggested three alternatives:
>(1) Post the page as PDF (though my colleague expects that would soon be 
>cracked), or
>(2) Routing the replies through some forwarding pointer to a single 
>officer whose unhappy duty it would be to dump the spam while forwarding 
>inquiries to appropriate club officers (not preventing spam, but shielding 
>the recipient's actual address), or
>(3) Presenting the user-name and mail domain in separate entries of a 
>column, requiring correspondents to reassemble the address in order to 
>write.
>
>I assume any measure we take will eliminate the possibility of 'click here 
>to write' e-mail.
>
>How are other people handling this issue?
>
>TIA.
> 
> John Mills
> john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu
>
>
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