[thelist] email address harvesters

[Warden, Matt]

> I seem to have had my email address harvested from my site alot recently.
> I'm wondering if anyone could tell me whether the spammers look for the
> rendered text or the code? I've seen people doing "name at site dot org"
but
> with the regular email address in the href. Are they just being cheecky or
> are they fooling someone?

Hi amanda,

I doubt it makes a difference. Bots just look for

[one or more chars]@[one or more chars].[one or more chars]

in the file. So, they'd find that in <a href="myaddress at mydomain.com"> and
also if the text of the link is myaddress at mydomain.com.

Why not do what evolt.org does with their archives? Rather than using @, use
%40 (I assume this is the URL-encoded value for '@'). Still works if you
click on <a href="myaddress%40mydomain.com">myaddress%40mydomain.com</a> (by
'works', I mean that it will still behave as if it was using @ instead of
%40.

I just checked the archive and we aren't doing this anymore. I'll figure out
what's up, but you might want to try this in the meantime.

Good luck,


--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com