Thierry Koblentz wrote:
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
The simple fact is that no solution will be completely foolproof.
It's like the problems with CAPTCHAs. Spammers continually work to
find workarounds for them and nothing you do will be 100% effective.
Mike's article gave me an idea; but I don't know much about spambots'
mechanisms.
Is a solution like this "foolproof" enough?
http://www.tjkdesign.com/articles/anti_spam_mailto.asp
I'd also considered that once before about 2 years ago when I was
writing the contact page on my site, but realised there were just too
many problems with it and doesn't really address the issue at all. It's
just moving the e-mail address from the HTML to both the HTTP Location
header and the response body of the 302 response.
The response looks like the following:
(I changed the e-mail address and removed unnecessary headers)
HTTP/1.x 302 Object moved
Location: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Content-Type: text/html
<head><title>Object moved</title></head>
<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This object may be found <a
HREF="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">here</a>.</body>
(Note the incorrect status code, it should be "302 Found")
It certainly doesn't hide the address in any way, though it may require
some spammers to modify their bots in order look in the right place for
it. If they look in the response body regardless of the HTTP status
code, they'll still get the address. Even if you write a custom
server-side script that doesn't send it in the response body, it's still
in the Location header for anything that cares to look there.
There would also be usability issues involved with it. Although it may
work for some people using a mail client like Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.
some browsers/mail clients may still choke on it, it would need to be
significantly tested. Users of web based mail will also be
disadvantaged because they may have difficulty finding the address to
copy and paste into their web based e-mail form.
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
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