[Web4lib] anti-spam email adress

[Thomas Dowling]

On 9/13/2006 2:08 PM, Pierre Nault wrote:
> ...I "encrypted" my email adress in
> hexadecimal, with % signs trying to find a solution.

This little trick can hardly be called encryption, and yet at one point
the spam bots were so inept that they were in fact fooled by it.  BTW,
do you really mean the % sign here?  Hex-encoding characters within HTML
 uses "&#x...;", so 'href="mailto:joe_smith&#x40foo.org"'.  I don't know
if they're still that stupid.



When I mouse over the
> link in Internet Explorer I can see the encryption (on the lower bar of the
> navigator), but with Firefox, I can see clearly my email adress... 

Firefox just happens to render the unescaped character in the status bar
while IE displays it as-is.

> ...and that
> maid me think that if Firefox can see that, there may be some
> indexing-robots that have that capabality.

Just about any programming or scripting language has this ability.
After all, any browser still needs to be able to tell that's a mailto
link, right?

> So is there a way to put an email adress on a web site without being spam ?

There's no way to include in a web page something that my browser
recognizes as a mailto link, but that an address harvester does not.
Just get a good spam filter and don't worry about it.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu