At 01:33 PM 1/30/2002, 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? > >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. > >--Elliot Wilen
I would not make public an internal directory in any media. Competitors and head hunters love that stuff. But you are likely to need some email addresses on your public site: Sales, support, info, etc. I believe that most harvesting software is too dumb to process HTML entities. If true then you can munge the addresses to be of the form: <a href="mailto:ewilen@mprinc.com">Elliot Wilen <ewilen@mprinc.com></a> ############################################################# This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
