Re: Spammers, Viruses and Attachments

[billc_lists]

At 7:58 AM -0700 3/13/04, Warren Michelsen wrote:
At 7:29 PM -0600 3/12/04, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At 9:49 AM -0700 3/12/04, Warren Michelsen wrote:
<snip>
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.
And it was your report that prompted me to do my own experiment.

Mine is linked to by a single period tucked away on our default 
page, so the same crawlers which would find the rest of the site 
will also find it (ie, real world conditions).  And they do.  The 
page in question is not submitted to any search engines, though of 
course our site is.

So, YMMV.
Maybe. Tell me, Bill, do you use mailto links of the sort:
<a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">Bill Christensen</a>
        or
<a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">[EMAIL PROTECTED]</a>
?
If the latter, do you encode BOTH the mailto address and the linked 
text version? Or do you only encode the mailto part? Some people 
assume that spammer 'bots look for "mailto" while I assume they look 
for "@".

When I encode, I encode all forms of email addresses, including the 
linked-to text.

That is, I use:
<a href="mailto: encoded">encoded</a>
Not:
<a href="mailto: encoded">NOT-encoded</a>
and, as I said, only the un-encoded version has received spam. 
Perhaps it's not a matter of YMMV, but of technique...


All are of the form <a href ="encoded in some way">.</a>, with a 
period as the link text.  I assumed they'd look for something of the 
form [EMAIL PROTECTED]

One is on our home page, as a sort of "control":

<a 
href="mailto:&#102;&#111;&#117;&#114;&#116;&#104;&#116;&#101;&#115;&#116;&#64;&#103;&#114;&#101;&#101;&#110;&#98;&#117;&#105;&#108;&#100;&#101;&#114;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;";>.</A>

and on the

linked page are:

<a href="mailto:firsttest&#64;greenbuilder.com";>.</a>

<a 
href="mailto:&#115;&#101;&#99;&#111;&#110;&#100;&#116;&#101;&#115;&#116;&#64;&#103;&#114;&#101;&#101;&#110;&#98;&#117;&#105;&#108;&#100;&#101;&#114;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;";>.</a>

<a 
href="&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;:&#116;&#104;&#105;&#114;&#100;&#116;&#101;&#115;&#116;&#64;&#103;&#114;&#101;&#101;&#110;&#98;&#117;&#105;&#108;&#100;&#101;&#114;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;">.</a>

The results:

firsttest  (only the @ encoded) 244k
secondtest (entire address encoded) 137k
thirdtest (everything between the quotes encoded) 136k
fourthtest (entire address encoded, placed on the home page) 3470k

Sorry, I can't tell you how long they've taken to accumulate that 
amount of spam.  Some time ago I purged those accounts, but I didn't 
record when.  All of them have received spam in the last month - the 
completely encrypted one as recently as last week, and the on on the 
home page got something today.

Those addresses have never been published anywhere else, of course.

--
Bill Christensen
http://greenbuilder.com/contact/
Green Building Professionals Directory: http://directory.greenbuilder.com
Sustainable Building Calendar: http://www.greenbuilder.com/calendar/
Green Real Estate: http://www.greenbuilder.com/realestate/
Straw Bale Registry: http://sbregistry.greenbuilder.com/
Books/videos/software: http://bookstore.greenbuilder.com/
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