Netco newsletter May/June 2006

this issue:
Dodging spammers | TeamTxt | Aussie Scammers | Mass mailing | Netco Search

Dodging spammers

Print your e-mail for all you're worth on business cards, magazine and newspaper advertisements, even on the back of your work van.

Spammers deal in e-mail addresses by the millions; few are looking at the printed page or cruising motorways and laboriously typing all addresses they see into their databases. Instead they start an e-mail harvesting computer program and go home to bed, waking in the morning to count how many hundreds of thousands of new address they snared overnight.

You can fight this by obfuscating your mail's appearance in the code that makes up your Web site, fooling their harvesting programmes into ignoring the e-mail tags.

Suppose this was a sentence on your Web page: "Please email bob@thefactory.co.nz for more details". While it's not simple, it certainly is convenient for a harvester to write an automated program to scan Web pages by the tens of thousands to capture this line of text (which is all your e-mail address looks like in this plain form) and sell it on to a spammer.

To overcome this you can disguise the e-mail link thus: "Please e-mail; for more details." But, life's not meant to be that easy and hiding e-mail addresses isn't either. In the HTML code that makes up the page your e-mail is still plain for all harvesters to see:

"Please e-mail for more details.

There are so many unguarded e-mails on Web pages that it's worth confusing the bots that come harvesting. If they can't see yours easily, they'll carry on and get the easy pickings elsewhere. At Netco we've developed an e-mail obfuscator that scrambles your e-mail details, putting them back into usable code only when a visitor clicks on the link to use it.

For example, bob@thefactory.co.nz when obfuscated, looks like this to a harvesting bot:

E-mail #x62;#x6F;#98;#x40;#x74;#104;#x65; #x66;#x61;#x63;#116;#111;#x72;#121;#46;#x63; #111;#x2E;#110;#122; for more details.

Remember, the harvesting bot doesn't sit there admiring your Web pages as a human might, it just dives into the HTML tags that instruct the page how to behave. It ignores the squiggles that disguise the e-mail links in your page's HTML. When your visitors view the page, the " Please e-mail;" looks perfectly functional and works that way too.

For the inquisitive, we mangle the mail into random hexadecimal and ASCII characters and the fortunate part is that it involves no JavaScript so it's perfect for Web sites that need to comply with government Web guidelines.

this issue:
Dodging spammers | TeamTxt | Aussie Scammers | Mass mailing | Netco Search