Hiding Your Email Address From Spammers

[Dynaweb]

As I am sure you already know, keeping your email address hidden from Spammers is very important.  Spiders and bots scour the web and find as many email addresses as possible and add them to databases.  Since these addresses are present on the internet, they typically prove much more successful than dictionary attacks.

Having said this, I would like this thread to be an ongoing, cooperative effort to form an article on the subject.

Let's go:

As I see it, SPAM comes through in three different ways:

1) Spiders scour the web and find emails that are in plain text and database them.

2) Bots get through web forms and send SPAM instead of the honest visitor feedback or occasional goofball as expected.

3) Programs send out dictionary attacks on your domain.

Let's go over these individually to see what can be done to protect yourself and your sanity.

1) Spiders scour the web and find emails that are in plain text and database them.

What you have to do here is go over your web site and make sure your email address is not presented in plain text.  For example, it may exist in this way

Code Select Expand

your@yourdomain.com
or like this

Code Select Expand

<a href="mailto:your@yourdomain.com">
or in some similar way.  AVOID THIS.  SPAMMERS and their spiders adore this as it leaves your email address wide open for collection into their precious database.

What can be done to avoid exposing your email address in plain text?

a) Use an image of your email address and do not link to the email address in the mailto method.
b) Use a quick and easy "(at)" in place of "@" and "(dot)" in place of "." like this:  me(at)mydomain(dot)com.
c) Use javascript to display the email address (my favorite way).  Here is a sample of the code to use:

Code Select Expand


<script language="JavaScript">
<!-- //Go choke on a chicken wing you spammer bastards!
var name = "me";
var domain = "mydomain.com";
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + name + '@' + domain + '\">');
document.write(name + '@' + domain + '</a>');
// --></script>
of course replace me & mydomain.com with your actual information.

2) Bots get through web forms and send SPAM instead of the honest visitor feedback or occasional goofball as expected.

To battle this you need to use the correct scripting in your web forms to combat SPAM.  Older forms do not take this into account.  One such script I recommend is Dynaweb's SFEPS located at http://www.dynawebdesigns.com/scripts.htm
It uses PHP which any HostNed account supports.

3) Programs send out dictionary attacks on your domain.

There are a few things you can do to combat dictioaryattacks.

a) Do not use an email catchall.
b) Name your email account names something that is hard to guess.  For example, instead of using the name contact(at)mydomain(dot)com use this instead, c.o.n.t.a.c.t8745(at)mydomain(dot)com