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Best Method For Foiling Email Harvesters?
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?"
IP geolocation and a shotgun.
Works for me.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
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.
Are you trying to say that Slashdot is a professional forum?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I've heard the following works fairly well, but haven't tried it m'self.
Put 2 email addresses on your web site, the real one, and a 'decoy' one which is hidden from normal users (eg white-on-white text right at the bottom of the screen).
Any email that arrives at the 'decoy' address is parsed, and the sender added to a blacklist.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
My email contact consists of Egyptian hieroglyphics in one of those 3d art displays. First you gotta stare at it for a few minutes to have the objects pop out. Next its a trip to Egypt where you must follow clues to meet an old shaman. Use his clues to navigate though a snake infested pyramid. Find the one eyed pirate after defeating the octopus. you are rewarded with a postcard with my email address in a sack in sans script. Be sure to avoid the poison arrows and rolling rock on the way out. Spammers be dammed.
The whole point of posting an email address on a website is to allow and support communication, not to obfuscate it and make it more difficult for a person to use. discouraging spam is important, but it must remain secondary to allowing email communication.
I predict Technical solutions will continue to fail to solve the spam problem, because it is not primarily a technical problem. It is a moral problem. Spammers (whoever they might be) are not respecting people. They are disrespecting us in order to get some money. Their values put dollars above the needs of anonymized people.
Until the moral problem can be solved adequately through accountability or other means, we are stuck with technical "solutions". Hopefully the solutions keep in mind the original intent of the technology or else we will continue to spend our time "jumping through hoops" rather than actually accomplishing work.
While a captcha does require human intervention, it makes it more difficult for a "normal" user to access. Same with nameIhatespam@domain.com or nameih8spam@domain.com or name @ domain.com This requires manual work and appears "unprofessional" Such confusion creates a barrier to effective communication.
Sure if you are on the "hackers are us" website such tricks are fine, 100% geeks, all interested in spending time re-typing information.
However if your audience is not technical, has any kind of failing eyesight (many over 60), or limited patience (the entire web audience) you had better keep it transparent for the end user. This is where javascript has served us well.
In recently gathering information from hundreds of manufacturing websites, I've found that the "cuter" the tricks, the less likely I am to pursue a working relationship with that manufacturer.
There are still tons of websites out there with unobscured email addresses in the HTML code and even in the text of the webpages. I don't see why spam harvesters would need to bother with javascript parsing engines when there is such a rich harvest of real email addresses out there.
I think people who are wiser than me need to consider how a community approach could seriously hamper spam. Maybe it is shaming the companies that build spam harvesting software. (we have imagination, we could 'make' them stop) I know that phoning and talking crossly to the wife of a spammer at an inconvenient time certainly created a stress reaction in her, which probably translated into stress reaction at their dinner table etc... I made the social cost of spamming high by phoning their 1800 number (costs them $0.05/minute). I made it real, I humanized my email address by "calling them on it" and complaining about their practices. (they still spam)...
Filtering is huge, but ultimately we need to call peopel to social responsiblity, and that requires one of two approaches that I can see.
1. Grassroots community accountabiltiy/reaction to spam
2. Top down legislative control.
Its a war, but the war isn't for or against SPAM, the war is for and against respecting others on the NET.
Greg.
I figured all these cruel slashdotters would add you to spam lists, so to try to offset the damage, I went through my spam folder and used some of the 'unsubscribe' links for you. Hopefully this will lessen your damage.
:x