Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Best Method For Foiling Email Harvesters?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the when-the-addresses-are-high-as-an-elephants-eye dept.

pjp6259 writes "One of the common ways that spammers generate email mailing lists is by harvesting email addressess from websites. But in many cases you also need to make it easy for your customers to reach you. I have found three common solutions to this problem: 1.) Use an image to replace your email address. 2.) Use ascii encodings for some/all of the characters. 3.) Use javascript to concatenate and/or obfuscate your email address. Which of these methods are most effective? Are email harvesters able to interpret javascript? What do you use?"

3 of 506 comments (clear)

  1. SpamGourmet.com by gumpish · · Score: 5, Informative

    SpamGourmet.com

    Makes it trivially easy to create a unique forwarding address for any website you care to visit, then set the domain of that site as an exclusive sender for that address.

    If a 3rd party starts spamming you at that address, Spam Gourmet just drops it, but continues to deliver relevant mail.

    Oh, and it's completely free.

  2. Re:Make people think to figure out your e-mail by EvanED · · Score: 4, Informative

    Coincidentally, there was an article just a few days ago on how to prevent spam to contact forms.

  3. Another method.. by catwh0re · · Score: 4, Informative
    To get around spam issues I bought a cheap domain and use an included service to redirect all the email that gets sent to that domain to a single email address. (Most will offer this service for free.)

    I then use separate email addresses for everything I sign up for. E.g. my bank email address is different from my health fund email address, which is different from my all of mp3 email address etc. I use a little code which isn't obvious(similar to a lookup table) to code each website into the username portion of the email address... That's why I'm a little annoyed at allofmp3.com at the moment, as I've supplied two email addresses to them on only two occassions, and both are huge spam recipients. So it's clear that not only does their financial arm sell my email address, but their online store does too.

    This method is good for 2 reasons: It's very easy to direct all email from particular addresses straight to the trash should they become spam targets and secondly, it's very easy for me to figure out (such as the allofmp3.com case) who sold my email address to spammers and when.