[thelist] Hiding email address from spambots

Peter Brunone (EasyListBox.com) peter at easylistbox.com
Thu Aug 5 09:16:12 CDT 2004


Casey,

	Obviously, the more complex the obfuscation, the more time you
probably have until breakdown :)  I would suspect that the CSS solution
will be toppled before long if it hasn't yet (but I'd never seen it
before, so cool!)

	Since I develop with ASP.NET, I've found a certain free control
to be very helpful.  It's written by the guy who does
www.SystemWebMail.com , and you can find it at http://emailspoofer.net .

Cheers,

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org On Behalf Of Casey Crookston

As we know, anytime an email address is displayed on a website,
espically inside an <a href="mailto:"> tag, it will eventually get
harvested by a spambot.  I've found a couple of tricks to keep this from
happening, and I'm wondering what the group thinks of these.  It's only
a matter of time before the spiders are modified to read these methods
as well, but perhaps one of these is a good short-term solution?

Before someone says it, yes yes, I know that the best way to do it is
with an html form and a server side script.

1) use CSS: http://www.phoenity.com/newtedge/hide_email_spambots/

HTML codes:
<p id="email">Lim Chee Aun</p>

CSS codes:
#email:after{
/* \40 is a character entity for the '@' symbol */
content: " <cheeaun\40phoenity.com>";
}


2) Use Javascript:
http://blazonry.com/javascript/js_hiding.php

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--

var lhs = "web";
var rhs = "blazonry.com";

function print_mail_to_link()
{
   document.write("<A HREF=\"mailto");
   document.write(":" + lhs + "@");
   document.write(rhs + "\">" + lhs + "@" + rhs + "<\/a>");
}

//-->
</SCRIPT>

3) Use Unicoding:
http://www.website101.com/spam_file/spambot_unicode.html

For example, the following email address:

webmaster at internet-tips.net

will be shown in Unicode as:


&#119;&#101;&#098;&#109;&#097;&#115;&#116;&#101;&#114;
&#064;&#105;&#110;&#116;&#101;&#114;&#110;&#101;&#116;
&#045;&#116;&#105;&#112;&#115;&#046;&#110;&#101;&#116;





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