[thelist] hiding email addresses

Barry Woolgar barry at burnthebook.co.uk
Mon Sep 22 03:13:03 CDT 2008


Hello

> Yep - don't publish 'em on the web.

In an ideal world I'd agree, however in the UK at least, commercial websites
can't get away with that. There was a change in the law (effective 1st Jan
2007) with the E-commerce Regulations _requiring_ certain information to be
clearly available. To quote from out-law.com[1]:

"It is not sufficient to include a 'contact us' form without also providing
an email address and geographic address somewhere easily accessible on the
site."

Apparently this applies to almost all companies, not just ones that actually
'sell' online. So yeah, some companies _might_ insist, but you should
_definitely_ insist (if you're a Brit developer, working for a UK company).

Hope that muddies the water a bit :)

Barry

[1] http://www.out-law.com/page-7594


-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Martin Burns
Sent: 19 September 2008 22:45
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] hiding email addresses


On 19 Sep 2008, at 12:38, graham.hays wrote:

> Is there a good (simple) way of hiding email addresses from spammers?

Yep - don't publish 'em on the web.

> I've been using the following approach but not sure if it works as
> intended... it displays OK (forename.surname at domain) but will it fool
> spammers?

Nope, although it's a *tiny* bit less vulnerable, and if you're the  
only one that uses it, it may not be worth the 2 minutes' effort  
required to parse it.

> If not what does anyone recommend

Don't publish email addresses on the web. Use contact forms that all  
the data is kept server side.

Cheers
Martin

--
 > Spammers: Send me email -> yumyum at easyweb.co.uk to train my filter
 > http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/





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