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Blocking Spam before it hits the Inbox
06:41:37 pm on January 27, 2006 | # |
Everybody who’s been on the internet for over two weeks has dealt with spam. Email filters aren’t necessarily the best solution, because your still getting sent the junk and the more you increase the level of protection the more likely you are to miss desired emails. The best option seems to be to prevent your email from getting in the hands of the Nigerian Spammers in the first place.
The Nigerian spam bots are searching the internet right now looking for your address; Nefarious automated programs looking for those clues in the HTML that give away an email address, like, the @ symbol or the .com extension. So how do you post your email address online without paying the spam piper?
One solution I’ve seen that works really well is a Flash encased email address. It displays like an email address, but it’s not actually text and therefore doesn’t appear in the HTML code. Which got me thinking that there must be an easier way to disguise the HTML code but still have an email address display correctly.
I’ve written a little web application that makes it easy:
It will generate HTML code for a given email address… HTML code that will display the email address correctly in a browser, but doesn’t look like an email address in the source. Simple and effective: Just copy the generated code and be confident that only human eyes will be able to tell that it’s an email address.
Please feel free to share this little utility.
http://www.nitrocode.com/resources.html
kermit 12:51 am on January 28, 2006 | #
Nifty. Nice add. I here about solutions like this alot, but then at the same time, I wonder how much “screen scraping” is used rather than the HTML source. We have a screen scraper app at work, so I know its possible.
bucky 2:32 am on January 28, 2006 | #
yeah I find it almost best to either hide it via css with text-indent:-999em and setting the background image or just hexencode it which seems to work okay for now. Thanks for the util.
spyder 4:24 am on January 28, 2006 | #
Kermit, yeah good point. Not many ways around screenscraping and I guess the term “spam blocker” is really a misnomer. I think of it like the club on a car though, thieves can still steal your car if they really want to, the idea is to get them to just go for somebody else’s in the parking lot. In the same respect, less spammers use a screen scrapper than a standard regular expression search through HTML for an email address. Once a blocker / etc becomes widely used though it starts to become ineffective proportionally. Take for example a pop-up blocker that is a feature of the most common browser toolbar: what is the first thing spammers are checking their pop-up up on? That toolbar. But if it’s not widely used, there’s less a chance they bothered to see if it blocks it.