Don’t Let Spam Bots Grab Your Email Address! | Lazy Jon - SEO Techniques, Webmasters tools, Affiliate Programs

Dec 24th 09 Posted by David Broadhead, Ph.D. in Web Design

Don\’t Let Spam Bots Grab Your Email Address!

Do you want to protect the email address used on your website from being harvested by spambots?

You need to have a \”mailto:\” link on your site so that people can contact you when they have a comment or question. This requires putting your email address on the page.

The problem is that one of the main methods that spammers use to obtain email addresses is to send a robot out to the internet whose primary purpose is to find email addresses. The spambot does this by looking at the HTML coding that the browser uses to show the webpage. It then saves the email address it finds after \”mailto:\”.

The old-school methods for \”hiding\” an email address:

* Munging. In this method, the email address is not put in a link. Rather it is supposedly hidden from the bots by substituting words for various parts of the address. Example: johndoe AT hotmail DOT com

* Encoding. The most common code used is standard ASCII code. Each letter or symbol in the email address is replaced by its equivalent. A simplified address a @ b.com would be coded as:

& #97; & #64; & #98; & #46; & #99; & #111; & #109; ( spaces were put in to prevent the browser from printing the actual address )

One can still use the mailto: link, since the browser recognizes this code, and prints out the actual address on the webpage.

But these techniques are no longer good enough.

These methods may have worked when they were first introduced, but one should never underestimate the intelligence of the hackers who program the spambots. There are new bots that can decode both of these email encryption techniques.

These two methods by no means exhaust the possibilities. A Google search on \”hide email address\” turns up over two million results. Even discounting duplicate methods, there are undoubtedly quite a few ingenious techniques available.

All right then, what do I do?

You don\’t need to go through all of those results from Google. I devised a method which I am absolutely certain will protect your email address from any and all robots. How can I make a statement like that? Because I don\’t think a hacker could easily locate the address himself, and the job of programming a robot to do it is practically insurmountable.

My method has the email address in the middle of a javascript, which is in turn located off the webpage itself, in a file that\’s located in a different folder. So the robot would need to discover both the name of the folder and the name of the file. Yet even though the address is not located anywhere in the HTML code of the page, it DOES appear – almost like magic – on the page itself. But a robot doesn\’t have eyes to see it!

Are you convinced? So-called \”experts\” have told me that it can\’t be done. Well, take a look for yourself. Just visit my webpage shown in the next paragraph, and you\’ll see how it works.

Visit the Professor\’s website, Professor\’s Coding Corner for useful code snippets and tutorials on various facets concerning web programming. In particular, the article, Stop Spambots will show you the proper way to protect your website.