Beware the Spambots!
By Michael Wilford
 If you are
like most businesses, email is becoming more and more a daily
part of your business communications. Unfortunately it seems
that dealing with spam is also a growing part of the routine.
Despite the passage of the Can-Spam law, spam traffic has not
been reduced significantly, if at all. The law has no reach
overseas and has little effect on con artists. Spam, or Unsolicited
Commercial Email (UCE), won't be stopped anytime soon by laws.
Your best hope right now is to use a decent spam filter and
keep your email address out of the spammers' hands. Guard your
email address closely and don't leave it around unprotected.
The number one method which spammers use to acquire their victims’ email
addresses is by getting it off a web page. They do this by
sending their software robots, spambots, out to scour the internet,
scooping up email addresses by the truckload. Most business
websites have contact information on them, that's a major function
of these sites, to facilitate communication with clients. So
the problem is how to allow that communication, without feeding
the spambots. Here are several solutions:
-
Use an image
for your email address which is not a live link. Impenetrable
to spambots. Drawbacks: Won't automatically open
a user's email program, forces user to write it down
or remember it (the horror!).
-
Try to trick spambots
using HTML character codes in the source code for some
of the email characters. Easy to implement.
Drawbacks: Not foolproof, some spambots seem to be catching on to this.
-
Use javascript to piece
together an email address when your web page is rendered.
Spambots can't touch it, yet.
Drawbacks: Not as easy to implement, especially for lots of emails.
-
Use a web form for the
user to communicate with you, making sure the email address
is not in the source code. Impenetrable
to spambots. Drawbacks: The most complex solution,
requires much more work.
This article ©2004 Wilford Design and may
not be reprinted without permission.
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