At 4:04 AM -0600 3/12/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >At 11:30 PM +0000 3/11/04, Telcontar wrote: >> >>What I have done, though, is set my address to contain HTML entities. I >>don't see any reason why spammers could possibly be fooled by that trick >>now, but still. > >Feh. > >I did a test on that some months ago after someone brought that idea up again in one >of the other lists. > >Test addresses were built with various portions encoded, including one which even had >the "mailto:"; part encoded. > >Guess what? They all received spam. They all received the same spam. Granted, not >as much as an address in plain text on the same page, but close enough to prove to me >that it wasn't worth the effort.
Guess what? It was I who set up a test page with encoded email addresses and not one of mine has received any spam. (There is an un-encoded 'control' address on the same page which has.) The site containing the page is routinely spidered by search engines to which I submit it and, I have to assume, spammer bots. USER_AGENTs include: Gigabot/1.0 Green Research, Inc. ia_archiver Mozilla(IE Compatible) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT 4.0) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows XP) Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker ([EMAIL PROTECTED]; http://www.WISEnutbot.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp) Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/cat; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; http://www.inktomi.com/slurp.html) msnbot/0.11 ( http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) NaverBot-1.0 (NHN Corp. / 82-2-3011-1954 / [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Program Shareware 1.0.6 sherlock_spider [EMAIL PROTECTED] TurnitinBot/1.5 http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html and, of course, some U-As don't give a USER-AGENT. The page in question is not visible to the casual web visitor so I tend to believe that most of the above are robots of some sort, regardless of the User-Agent specified. For me, encoding email addresses has worked pretty well. ############################################################# 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]>
