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 Category :: Spam |
Author :: Richard Lowe  |
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| Article Title :: Spam: Hiding Your Email Address |
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In many instances you will want to put your email address on
your website, even if you provide a form as a contact method.
This is useful because it increases the number of ways that
someone can contact you. Why is that important? Because
presumably if you have a website you are attempting to
communicate with the world - and communication goes both ways.
If you have a commercial site then the answer should be obvious
- someone may want to purchase something.
Another reason to put an email address directly on your web page
is for people to request information via autoresponder. These
allow your visitors to click a simple mailto link and get your
promotional materials or articles in their email inbox.
The problem with directly including your email addresses on your
page is spam harvesters. These a programs created by scum and
run by ignorant or unethical fools. What they do is search
through the internet, looking at web sites and pages for email
addresses to add to those million email address collections that
you see advertised (mostly in spam) all over the place.
There is really no ironclad way to prevent these bottom-feeders
from scanning your web site for email addresses. There are a
number of techniques, however, to make it a little more
difficult for them.
One of these is to code your email addresses in something called
Unicode. This is a "language" for encoding special characters on
web pages. All modern browsers support Unicode as it's primary
intention is to allow languages all over the planet to be
represented.
For example, the following email address:
webmaster@internet-tips.net
will be shown in Unicode as:
webmaster
@internet
-tips.net
As you can see from the table below, using Unicode characters is
simple. Just substitute the Unicode sequence in the table for
the corresponding character. Then use all of those sequences
wherever you want to put that email address.
@ @ E E M M U U c c k k s s .
. F F N N V V d d l l t t - -
G G O O W W e e m m u u _ _ H
H P P X X f f n n v v A A I I
Q Q Y Y g g o o w w B B J J R
R Z Z h h p p x x C C K K S S
a a i i q q y y D D L L T T b
b j j r r z z
I suppose it is inevitable that the scum spammers will
eventually make their spam robots smart enough to understand
these codes. Until then, however, it is a reasonably effective
technique for reducing spam in your inbox.
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