Email spammers were making me crazy! I needed a way to have my email on my blog but make it harder for email spam bots and spiders to snag. I looked into many ways to mask my email. Several of the options are lousy work arounds and don't allow people to click on a link.
I found a site that gives you several customizable options, (including JavaScript) to go with a ASCII code "generator" that masks your email. While I can't report on my results yet, I've just done it for my site and thought I'd pass it along:
Address Munger
If you go to my site, in the left column you'll see "Contact" and when you hover over "Amy" it displays my email, but in my template, the code looks something like this:
+#x6d:+#97:+#x69:+#x6c:+#x74:+#00111:+#58:+#x63:+#00111:+#00111:+#107:
+#x69:+#x6e:+#103:+#00119:+#x69:+#00116:+#x68:+#0097:+#x6d:+#x79:+#0098:
+#00108:+#x6f:+#103:+#0064:+#x79:+#x61:+#x68:+#x6f:+#x6f:+#x2e:+#99:+#111:+
#00109:">+#0065:+#109:+#x79:
(I changed a few bits so the code won't work and so it displays)
This Post was written by Amy from Cooking with Amy.
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6 comments:
That's a clever little thing, although I don't like to have a new e-mail opened for me automatically. I don't use the default e-mail program on either of the computers I use (work and home); I use hotmail and yahoo so something like this just means that I have to copy the address and close the new e-mail.
I put my e-mail address on my blog as "contact me at tinybanquetcommittee [at] yahoo dot com" and to date have not received any spam at that address.
I use a custom (but not too difficult) Javascript to write out my email. I'm always surprised that the HTML encoding works to stave off spammers. Spam spiders probably do a search for @, but it wouldn't be hard to look for the numerical equivalent. But I know they're not going to build a JavaScript parser into their spider.
The one problem with using a JavaScript version, of course, is that some people turn off JavaScript. They probably don't see my email address at all.
You could always just make an image of your email address. I'm pretty sure even spammers haven't gotten desperate enough to scan every image they find on a website through text recognition programs for email addresses.
I also think that anyone who wants to email you directly from you site is probably willing to open an email program up and type your address in themselves. If they want to quickly respond to you they can just comment, but I don't think not being able to click on a link to automatically pop up an email program is necessarily a bad thing.
Isn't it just amazing all the steps we have to take to avoid being spammed to death? I had spam completely removed from my one company email, and then my web-hosting firm changed the email program and now I get TONS of SPAM again. The mail account is utterly useless to me now. I just gave up and send everyone of importance to my gmail or hotmail accounts, since they are actually better at filtering.
I saw one of those email forms and thought that might be a good solution too. I'm going to see if there is a reduction in spam with this and if not, I will try something else. It is all very disheartening!
I'm going to try this and to remove moderation from my blog. Let's see what happens.
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