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.

Comments

Un-what?

[devphil]

replacing all mailto: links on our website with something unharvestable (i.e. 'user (at) address'

What makes you think "user at mail dot foo dot com" is unharvestable? The web archives of all the development mailing lists at gcc.gnu.org use that scheme, and we still get spam to unique addresses used only for sending mail to those lists.

It's a handy technique, and useful, but it's certainly not foolproof.

simple js

[anim8]

<script>
<!--
var u = "sales" ;
var d = "example" ;
var t = "com" ;
var a = u + '@' + d + '.' + t ;
document.write('<a href="mailto:'+a+'">'+a+'</a>') ;
//-->
</script>

Re:Don't bother, it's too late

[Rick the Red]

No kidding. Comcast gives us seven email addresses, so I set one up for each of us. My three month old gets spam, and nobody has EVER used that account (except me sending a test email when I first set it up). These scum just take a brute-force approach to generating email addresses, and don't care how many are undeliverable. They come with opt-out buttons, but all those do is confirm they found a valid address, and they never send from the same address twice, so adding them to a filter list doesn't work either. Bayesian filters on the content is the only way to go.