[thelist] Email Obfuscation may be beaten?

[Raditha Dissanayake]

Hi,

Well what you say is true, i believe most spambots may identify 
addresses from the mailto:  prefix in the href attribute. The reason i 
am saying this is because on some of our sites where the address is part 
of a link we are bombarded with spam. On others where we just display 
the email address with out making it a link we get less spam.



Liam Delahunty wrote:

> on 30/01/2004 10:59 Raditha Dissanayake said the following:
>
>> extracting your email address will be one line of code in many 
>> programming languages
>>
>>> <a href="mailto:&#100;&#97;....>&#100;&#97;</a>
>>
>>
>
> I realise that, but anything is better than nothing [1], and I believe 
> with the ease of getting most email addresses, the spam bots don't 
> currently bother I was just wondering of others experiences.
>
> There's probably a number of reasons for spammer ignoring hidden 
> emails addresses:
> 1. they'll get millions of easy email addresses anyway.
> 2. the recipient really doesn't want any mail so would be (even more) 
> pointless email.
> 3. (Probably the real reason) these addresses may also be used to help 
> create blacklists.
>
> [1] My server rejected 364 spams or attempts to relay yesterday (from 
> blocklists) http://www.britstream.com/support/rejects_statistics.php
> still a whole bunch more get through - I got about 80 myself caught by 
> procmail. (Mostly the latest virus)
>


-- 
Raditha Dissanayake.
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