Hiding your e-mail address from spamming bots
- Do you have a web site?
- Are you tired of receiving spam mail?
- Do you wonder where spammers got your e-mail address from?
Where do spammers get e-mail addresses from?
One of the ways spammers' mailing list get your e-mail address is simply from your web site. They use e-mail harvesting bots (sometimes also called internet spiders) and they collect as many e-mail addresses from webpages as they can. They just crawl the web based on links they find from search engines.
Say for instance you want a target audience that is related to gambling to send them for example a spam mail about an online casino. Just search on Google and Altavista (to name the most popular ones) on the word "gamble" and feed the link to your spider. It will start following every link and sublink etc... and it will search in each page the text "<a href="mailto:xxx@yyyyyy.zzz">". It will then extract the xxx@yyyyyy.zzz from it and store it in its mailing list. The "spam list people" just let their computer run for a few days like that and they have a database to put onto a CD and then the selling business starts. A few days later all the poor dudes that have a web site related to or containing the word "gamble" will start receiving casino spam.
The solution
There are several ways to hide your mailaddress on your website.
One of the best ways and most convenient ways according to the webdesign layout and style is using a JavaScript piece of code that "scrambles" your mailto link.
JavaScript is not mastered by anybody writing HTML, hence my own creation to write the code for you!
Download my own creation: Trick Spam Bots! For Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP
Stop mail harvesting bots from getting your e-mail address from your web site and encode your e-mail without affecting your surfing visitors.
You do not need to know JavaScript! TSB writes it for you!
Check it out on this website, the link at the bottom of each page is encoded and protected. You can click it to mail to me but you cannot find a piece of code that says <a href="mailto:mymailaddress"> anywhere in the source of this page.
Download it now and protect your mailaddress on your website.
The most important is that it is FREE WARE!
What is new in version 2.0 (dated May 29th, 2002, build 12)
- Added the use of tabs in the user interface.
- Added encoding safety from "klever bots" that would unescape the page. I now use several Javascript += concatenation instructions to better hide the data.
- Now supporting two mail addresses and their description to put onto the same HTML page. If you only need one then only use the first link from the link tab. Never mind the code overhead in the header as it is only a few lines.