[thelist] Email address hiding question

Christian Heilmann codepo8 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 1 10:09:25 CDT 2005


> An idea I just got- what if you had a function, say displayEmail($name,
> $address) that you would use like this:
> <p>Send an email to <?php echo displayEmail('me', 'lustig at brandeis.edu');?> to
> get updates.</p>
> Depending on the user-agent string, it would either display a link or it
> wouldn't. For normal browsers (being liberal) it would display an obfuscated
> mailto: link, but if it didn't have a user-agent string that matched a known
> web browser, it would just display the name without any link. That way
> spambots (which as far as I know don't use standard user-agent strings) just
> would never see any link at all...

I am sure that spammer _do_ know how to simulate a real browser. I
would be very surprised if anything related to user agent is a good
counter measure. Heck, even offline browsers have a "simulate IE"
option :-)


-- 
Chris Heilmann 
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/  
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/


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