[ale] e-mail address harvesting from web pages

[Keith R. Watson]

At 06:03 PM 7/15/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>ALErs -
>
>On reading a recent Consumer Reports article on spam, one person whose
>e-mail I post on an organization's web site asked that I either take some
>measures to impede harvesting addresses from our web site, or that I
>remove his address. He suggested a graphic image instead of text.
>
>I am concerned that redoing text pages as graphics will cause me more work
>(though not overwhelmingly more, as I only update this fram annually), and
>that its legibility would depend greatly on each viewer's browser setup.
>
>I suggested three alternatives:
>(1) Post the page as PDF (though my colleague expects that would soon be
>cracked), or
>(2) Routing the replies through some forwarding pointer to a single
>officer whose unhappy duty it would be to dump the spam while forwarding
>inquiries to appropriate club officers (not preventing spam, but shielding
>the recipient's actual address), or
>(3) Presenting the user-name and mail domain in separate entries of a
>column, requiring correspondents to reassemble the address in order to
>write.
>
>I assume any measure we take will eliminate the possibility of 'click here
>to write' e-mail.
>
>How are other people handling this issue?
>
>TIA.
>
>  John Mills
>  john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu


John,

Here are several methods.

Encrypted mailto
http://www.jracademy.com/~jtucek/email/index.html


Plain text obfuscated mailto

<script language=javascript>
<!--
var zzuser = "foo";
var zzhost = "bar.com";
var zzlink = "Click here to send me email";
document.write("<a href=" + "mai" + "lto:" + zzuser + "&#64;" + zzhost + 
">" + zzlink + "</a>")
//-->
</script>


-------------

Keith R. Watson                        GTRI/ITD
Systems Support Specialist III         Georgia Tech Research Institute
keith.watson at gtri.gatech.edu           Atlanta, GA  30332-0816
404-894-0836

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