On 01/30/02 at 13:33, Elliot Wilen wrote:
> Reply to: foiling address harvesting from web pages
> Does anyone have any idea how intelligent addressing-harvesting bots are
> these days? I'm considering a policy on publishing staff email addresses
> on our web page. Even if we start putting in spamtrap addresses for SIMS,
> I'd like to avoid putting real addresses up in usable form.
>
> Are bots likely to reconstruct addresses listed as "somebody AT
> mprinc.com"? How about addresses listed as just "somebody" with a note
> at the top of the list to append "@mprinc.com" to all addresses?
> (Since the website is www.mprinc.com, a bot wouldn't really have to be
> smart enough to read the note--it could just guess that the domain is
> "mprinc.com".) What about other forms of munging?
You're probably giving spambots too much credit for cleverness. For a 'bot to
be able to do that kind of thing, it would need to be able to figure out that
the word 'someone' represents an e-mail address. Since the username portion of
an e-mail address can be more or less arbitrary I rather doubt that any spam
harvesting 'bot would be that intelligent.
> Speculation is welcome, but I'd really like to know if there are
> definitely any harvesters out there which are reconstructing email
> addresses.
>
> Would also like to know what others think, in general, about publishing
> unmunged email addresses in publicly-viewable staff directories.
You could use a JavaScript that lets browsers unmunge the addresses on the
client side, under the theory that 'bots aren't fully functional http clients
and so won't be able to do JS. Personally, though, I just include a couple of
spam trap addresses mixed in with the real addresses, and then trust SIMS
anti-spam features (spamtrap, RBL, etc.) to keep the spam noise down to a dull
roar. SIMS has done that pretty well for me to this point. 8^)
Christopher Bort | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Webmaster, Global Homes | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<http://www.globalhomes.com/> | PGP public key available on request
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