Email harvesting from website.

[echnidna]

Hi, I am setting up my website, www.australianmadesouvenirs.com.au and would like to prevent the bots from harvesting email addresses.
All suggestions very welcome.

[bitingmidge]

Bob,

Have a look at http://*www.robgray.com and follow links as follows: >getREAL> articles>nospam email

I dont' know if the advice works, but it seems to make sense.

Regards,

P (Have a look at some of Rob's photo's while you are there!)

[Daddles]

Don't bother trying Bob. There are a lot of strategies but the reality is, they will get you one way or the other. So the tack I've taken with my site, and the same tack taken with a mate who's site rates among the top of its type, is to make things as easy for our customers as possible - that means putting our email on every page as a clickable link.

I don't have a huge spam problem. I'm with Bigpond and they seem to control it very well. My mate is with AOL and he doesn't have a problem either. Before I changed to Bigpond, I was with Senet and was getting 100+ spams a day, regardless of my email address. I've been with Bigpond long enough for it to be a problem, am active on a number of forums and email lists - I don't see spam as a problem provided your ISP is on the ball.

Cheers
Richard

[DarrylF]

There is only one way to avoid it - don't put your email address on the site.

Instead use a contact form - they fill it out like sending an email and the site sends it to you as an email. Easy enough to set up if you have any sort of code access beyond HTML to the server. Since we moved to that system spam has dropped a fair bit. If you ditch the old email address at the same time you should be able to kill it pretty well alltogether.

[Daddles]

Darryl's right there. The only danger lies in your email address winding up on other people's computers, people who wind up with a trojan. But hey, just how paranoid do you want to be?

Richard

[jackiew]

if you do go down the contact form line.

a) think about how many words you'll allow and if there is a limit say how big the limit is above the data entry box. I HATE writing 200 words and then getting back an error message telling me that i've written more than 10 words - and if i'm really lucky their software will have thrown away everything I've written.

b) if you do have an entry box for their problem then make it big enough to see more than ten words at a time and make it scrollable.

c) not done any of this but I'm guessing that a picklist for the subject of the email will enable you to then either direct the emails to one of a number of email addresses or to ensure that the subject lines of the emails will be from a limited set ( anything else is spam ) for the account your emailing.

d) use a different email address when you actually reply to them. That way you can change the email address(es) your enquiries are directed to if for some reason you're getting heaps of spam without changing your main correspondence email address.

3) do consider allowing people to contact you without supplying their email address ( though do warn them that they haven't supplied it and you won't be able to reply ). They could be being nice and telling you that you've got a problem on your site but not actually want to let YOU know their email address.

[Wayne Davy]

What I did on my personal site is to put an email link that uses a bit of Java code to construct my email address on the fly. That way the email address does not exist in the page code but is created when someone clicks on the link. Seems to have stopped the 'email bots' picking up my address.

[kiwigeo]

Hi, I am setting up my website, www.australianmadesouvenirs.com.au and would like to prevent the bots from harvesting email addresses.
All suggestions very welcome.

As well as the suggestions by others in this forum you could also consider setting yourself up an email service with a third party such as spamcop. All incoming mail gets run through heavy duty spam filters and 99% of spam gets blocked by same. Occasionally a bonafide mail might get blocked but all blocked mail gets put into a held mail folder and you then have the choice of deleting or releasing the mail. Ive been using spamcop for 4 years now and havent had one spam mail.

[kiwigeo]

Before I changed to Bigpond, I was with Senet and was getting 100+ spams a day, regardless of my email address.

Had the same experience when I was with Senet....problem got worse when they got taken over by Ozemail (Id originally switched to Senet because I was unhappy with Ozemail!!).