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How are You Preventing Mailto-Link Harvesting?
mixwhit asks: "In our ever increasing effort against spam, we are now considering replacing all mailto: links on our website with something unharvestable (i.e. 'user (at) address', javascript mailto links, character entity evasion, etc.). Obviously this won't stop the spam, but it seems prudent to stop the harvesting so that the spam may slow down someday (year 2024 maybe?). What are others doing with this issue? We would prefer to preserve mailto link clickability, but also only want to make this adjustment once." One suggestion I would make is to put your email address in an image. People can read it, but harvesters won't be able to harvest it (unless they download the image for OCR), but any barrier you can place in front of the spammer, without blocking people honestly interested in communicating with you, is probably a good thing.
Just use a mail form instead of mailto: links. Once you reply to feedback mail, the sender has your address and you can correspond normally. Meanwhile, evil spambots can't harvest an address that isn't shown anywhere.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
You have to consider the trade-off of the inconvenience of your readers/customers with the amount of spam you get.
I have a few websites with my email address all over them, in mailto links. I "mask" the email very lightly, by escaping most of the characters, and it has worked beautifully.
Here is a webpage that will quickly convert your mailto link into a form that bots will miss.
Could a bot be written that would be able to harvest these email messages? YES. But would it be worth the spammer's time to code it? NO, so it probably won't happen.
Put yourself in the spammer's shoes (or slime-covered bedroom slippers). Why would you want to go to a lot of work to build a bot that will harvest the email addresses of the very people you don't want to get your spam, because they will report you to spamcop, harass your ISP, and even hack your computer and post some very unattractive pictures of you on the internet?
No, they want the chumps, and they want to find them without needing to check every webpage for dozens of patterns.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I suspect you're using an ad-blocking browser or proxy, which has blocked the image itself but has left a large (clickable) white space that would be the image if you hadn't blocked it. That's the behavior Firebird shows for me, blocking ads.osdn.com. If you're using Mozilla or Firebird, and you right-click on the "background" I think you'll find "block images from this server" or "block images from ads.osdn.com" checked.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
The problem with having e-mail addresses encoded in images goes beyond excluding the blind. People with text-only browsers (a la lynx), screen readers, PDAs, cell phones, etc. are all excluded.
It's important to remember that web pages are not always rendered visually.