[WEB4LIB] RE: re webmaster address on web site

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2002 at 08:15:42AM -0700, Karen Jurgens wrote:
> and for this msg out of lurk mode.  I don't know what else people here
> have tried but if you use Dreamweaver there is a downloadable behavior
> called UTImailto that embeds the email address in the page in binary
> format that cannot be picked up by spambots.

The problem is that spambots are getting smarter and smarter about these
sorts of tricks: as soon as enough people use this method to make it
worth the spammers' time to write the code, it'll be reverse-engineered
and built in.  (This has already happened with JavaScript-based obfuscation,
which is what some folks have been doing.)

I don't mean to discourage its use in the interim: it'll probably work
for a while.  One technique that I've used which falls into the same
sort of stop-gap category is to write out an email address like this:

	rsk [at] magpage.com
or 
	rsk at magpage.com
or
	rsk at magpage dot com

which will no doubt also be parsed and grabbed as soon as someone gets
around to it.  (It also has the downside of confusing new users, some of
whome type that text directly into their mail clients.)  Its only real
merit is that it's simple, cross-browser and relatively compact.

> One can also put the email address into a graphic (linked to a mailto:)
> that is the same as the surrounding text.

The problem with that is that it makes it invisible to anybody using
a text-based browser -- the blind, for example -- or anybody running
a browser with image loading turned off.  (Which, BTW, is an interesting
exercise if you've never tried it.  I do it all the time because my
maximum connect rate from home is 28-33K: old phone switch, no DSL, no
cable, no wireless.)

---Rsk