This might help:
I have a php file in my doc root called email.php. Instead of linking an
email address with <A HREF="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]";>, I link it like this:
<A HREF="email.php?to=justin&domain=indent.com.au">Justin French</a>
(Actually I do it with a function, but for clarity sake, I'll leave the
above in place).
email.php isn't a HTML page, it's a small script which sends a mailto:
header to the browser:
<? // email.php
if(!isset($_GET['to']))
{
$_GET['to'] = "info";
}
if(!isset($domain))
{
$_GET['domain'] = "mydomain.com.au";
}
$to = $_GET['to'];
$domain = $_GET['domain'];
$email_address = $to."@".$domain;
// send email header to page
header ("Location: mailto:$email_address";);
?>
As you can see, there are defaults in there, so if they link to
email.php?to=justin, the default domain will be used, and vice-versa for a
missing "to", or both missing.
I tested it in a few browsers, and the original page was not refreshed... an
email window popped up in outlook express, just as it would with a regular
mailto: link, and everything works fine.
This prevents spiders hunting for mailto:something in your pages. Other
spiders might look for anything that looks like an email address, so I'd
recommend not having regular email address' anywhere:
<A HREF="email.php?to=justin&domain=indent.com.au">Justin French</a>
instead of
<A HREF="email.php?to=justin&domain=indent.com.au">[EMAIL PROTECTED]</a>
I've seen some simular stuff where the users put in something like a space
around the @ to make it harder for the spiders to find the text too, but I
dunno if this is that reliable:
<A HREF="email.php?to=justin&domain=indent.com.au">justin @
indent.com.au</a>
Of course the other option is to strip every email address from your site,
and put in a "contact us" form.
Justin French
on 14/05/02 12:07 PM, David McInnis ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> I have been running a newswire service since 97 and recently noticed an
> increase in the number of people flipping our site to harvest email
> addresses contained in the news releases posted on our site. (prweb.com)
>
> I am running apache and php on a linux box. Can anyone suggest
> something that I can implement that would block users who are harvesting
> data from our site? I do not mind legit users from using this data, but
> the flippers are chewing up my bandwidth and db resources.
>
> I also want to be careful to not block valid search engine spiders from
> indexing our site.
>
> David McInnis
>
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