Yeah, I actually wrote a spam bot trap. Pretty easy, just dump this
code into a page and link to it (can be an "invisible" link, the bots
don't care):
<cfset alphaNumList =
"a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
">
<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="1000">
<cfset email = "">
<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="10">
<cfset email = email & listGetAt(alphaNumList,
randRange(1,listLen(alphaNumList)))>
</cfloop>
<cfset email = email & "@">
<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="10">
<cfset email = email & listGetAt(alphaNumList,
randRange(1,listLen(alphaNumList)))>
</cfloop>
<cfset email = email & ".com">
<cfoutput><a href="mailto:#email#";>#email#</a></cfoutput>
</cfloop>
<br><br>
<cfoutput><a href="#cgi.script_name#">click here</a></cfoutput>
This will totally trash their email lists.
Other ideas:
- don't display email address - use a contact form that cfmail's the
desired recipient (there's some issues here, but you can manage this).
Then, the recipient will have the originator's email, and can contact
them if they'd like.
- obfuscate the email address - either place something like
[EMAIL PROTECTED] in there (which you randomize on a regular
basis) and educate your users appropriately or htmlEncodedFormat the
email address (so the source trashes the email address, but the user can
see the actual email address when it is rendered) or put some comments
in there -
billy@<!-- die spamming losers! -->architechx.com
Another idea would be to dynamically generate the emails in images.
(create a GIF/JPG that contains the actual text.
Of course none of these will work if you are using mailto: links - but
losing these links may be worth saving your users (not to mention that
many free email users can't take advantage of mailto: links, depending
on their browser). Most user feel comfortable enough with writing down
an email address or copy/pasting it into their email client/provider.
---
Billy Cravens
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On
Behalf Of David Grant
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2002 11:04 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Email Harvesting
That is awful. I hate spam bots.
Here is a page discussing steps for ridding your unix site of spambots:
http://www.neilgunton.com/spambot_trap/
Some of the same principles could be applied to a CF site.
HTH,
David Grant
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On
Behalf Of Hal Barker
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2002 11:06 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Email Harvesting
Greetings,
Our site has been hit by Korean language email harvesters who send
hundreds of thousands of Hangul emails to visitors to the Korean War
Project who have left their email addresses for contact purposes.
Any suggestions how to limit harvesting, since we have over 45,000 email
addresses open to the public. Taking the email addresses off would
totally kill our site, but anyone who has left their email address now
receives
up to 20 to 30 Korean language SPAM emails a day.
Hal
Hal Barker, Dallas, Texas
B.A. History
Korean War Project
http://www.koreanwar.org
Founder - Korean War Veterans Memorial, Washington.D.C.
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