[thelist] email address harvesters

[Chris Evans]

I was working and needed a break, so I whipped this code up. It takes a
string and converts it to the escaped HTML version ( or whatever you call
them).  For example, it converts "chris at fuseware.com" to
"chris@fusewar
e.com".

I tested it on IE 5, NS 4, NS 6, and NS3, all on Win2k, and it seemed to
work for all of them.

I'll throw it in a tip so it gets harvested.

<tip type="masking email address in CF" author="Chris Evans">
Here's some code to convert your email address to HTML extended chars to
mask it from email harvesters:

<CFSET ASCIIString="">
<CFSET EMail = "chris at fuseware.com">
<CFLOOP From="1" To="#Len(EMail)#" Index="i">
	<CFSET ASCIIString=ASciiString & "&###Asc(Mid(EMail,i,1))#;">
</CFLOOP>
<CFOUTPUT><a href="mailto:#ASCIIString#">#ASciiString#</a></CFOUTPUT>

</tip>


Chris Evans
chris at fuseware.com
http://www.fuseware.com






-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Warden, Matt
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 9:35 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] email address harvesters


> 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


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