How To Stop Spam Bots from
Obtaining Your Email Address from Your Website
~~Tina
Clarke, AccessFP - FrontPage Resource Centre
After much research I've come to the conclusion that you cannot provide
a non-spammable email link on a web page and still meet accessibility
guidelines.If you use encoders like
http://www.ahgrens-dental.se./pages/demos/
scrambleEmail.html
to produce an html clickable link which is accessible even by screen
readers, your email is still visible to the world. Evil robot harvesters
that are advanced can easily do the job. They look for patterns, and
since every link contains a mailto: and also uses the something@somethingdomain.com layout, the robot only has to search for these, even
if the mailto: text is encoded as well. Though bots that can do this are
probably not widely in use at this time, they soon will be.
It is easy it is to determine if your address is
available. You can
test it yourself by making a page with an html encoded email using the
service at the above link. Then save it and upload the page to your
server. Take the url of the test page and insert it into this form at:
http://willmaster.com/possibilities/demo/RetrieveEmails.cgi.
It will show you any and all email links on that page.
However when you use JavaScript encoded email links the above link
cannot read your email address even when you use it as the text to be
clicked on.
http://www.golivecentral.com/pages/txttut/scramble.shtml
This site above gives you the code and also scrambles it for you, but
this
does not give you a completely accessible email address because of the
use of JavaScript.
I think the best solution, therefore, is one that:
- Is accessible, in as far as the text can be
read by a screen reader.
- Is not clickable but will cut down on the
amount of people contacting you that really have nothing to say that
you want to hear. (If they can't take an extra ten seconds to copy
and paste to an email 'To' line, then you are better off if they do
not contact you.)
- Won't let the evil harvester Bot have it's
wicked way with your address, and therefore your precious time, when
you have to deal with numerous unwanted emails.
- Is very simple to do.
Try this:
Place your cursor where you want the address to
appear and go to html view and insert the following:
Contact: name<code>@</code>domain.com
Change the name and domain.com to your own details.
View your web page and you will see it looks like a normal email address
but is not clickable and can't be read by a Bot.
Other choices are:
1. Use a JavaScript solution
http://www.golivecentral.com/pages/txttut/scramble.shtml
2. Use forms which hide your email address
Why should you use a form? Not everyone has access to pop email and many
use web mail services, which won't work with mailto: links, so a form
should be provided. However you have to make sure your email
address is protected within the form. Using method number 4 (below) is a
good idea. Or you can use PHP, Perl or ASP forms, and hard code the
address into the PHP, Perl or ASP coding NOT the html.
Here are some free form scripts.
http://ostermiller.org/contactform/ (Perl)
http://jimsun.linxnet.com/SCForm.html (PHP)
3. Insert something that makes the address undeliverable for a
Bot, but humans can still use it. An example is simply to insert nospam
into the address which can then be removed by the user.
e.g.: janedoe-nospam@somedomain.com
The address with nospam taken out will then be
janedoe@somedomain.com
You must instruct your site visitors to remove the "nospam" part of the
email address or you won't hear from anyone.
4. Use an autoresponder address which you will never have to look
at, and the autoresponder will send the user your real email address
in an email , which they can then use to email you directly. Bots can't
cope with this. Utilise this free autoresponder:
http://sendfree.com/
5. Use a graphic which is composed of your email address. Don't
link it to your email address though, as that will appear in the html
and is
available to the bots.
If you're in business, you might want to ensure your contact with your
customers. Perhaps something like Querybot might suit your needs.
http://www.querybot.com/autoresponder.htm
If you want to fight back, read this page:
http://www.spamhelp.org/harvesterkiller/
Tina Clarke - Microsoft MVP - FrontPage, is
the Webmaster of AccessFP - FrontPage Resource Centre
http://accessfp.net/
and http://addonfp.com
She is also an editor of AnyFrontPageBytes Ezine. Subscribe to the ezine
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AnyFrontPageBytes and
get FREE FrontPage E-Books upon joining. And don't forget to subscribe to get
Weekly FrontPage Tips. Tina is also an artist and the owner of
http://clarke-abstract-art.com/
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