WebSolvant New Delhi Web Designers and Developers Company
Make no mistake. You cant escape death, taxes, or spam. The only thing you can do is try to reduce spam and prevent spammers from getting your email address *easily*. The following briefly explains why this is, and offers a balanced solution to make getting your email address as difficult as possible for spambot harvesters, while still making your site friendly for users.
There are a couple email gold-mines for spammers to get your address.
- Malware on other peoples computers
- Harvesting addresses from web sites
Malware on other peoples computers harvests addresses and/or sends spam. The only way to stop that is for people to use anti-virus software and a firewall. But thats not anything that you can control.
Harvesting addresses from web sites is where you can make it either impossible, or extremely difficult for a spammer to get your email address. Your options are:
1) Dont put any addresses on your site
While this is obvious, it makes it pretty hard for potential customers to contact you. Not a good idea.
2) Use an email form
Email forms force you to rely on someone to type their email address properly so that you can respond to them. Though it guarantees that spambots cant “get your address”, for legitimate users it reduces email reliability, and spammers can still use your email form to spam you directly. If you cannot respond to a potential customer because they accidentally mistyped their email address, you end up looking like the bad guy. Again, not a really great solution.
3) Use a graphic
Putting your email address in a graphic puts up an added barrier and forces your potential customers to type your email address. However, graphics do not offer any real advantage over obfuscation. The technology for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and principles for cracking captchas are well understood and do not differ for what would be required to rip an email address out of a graphic. Combined with not being very user friendly, this is not the best option.
4) Use obfuscation
Obfuscation is your best bet to put up the most difficult barrier possible while still balancing usability and ease for your web site visitors. You stop spambots from harvesting your address and you still allow users to click on your email address.
Spam is all about numbers and costs have to be low to deal with the massive volumes that spammers need in order to get a sale/victim. CPU cycles are expensive. The more processing power you need, the more computers you need, and that all costs money and/or time. Obfuscation addresses this directly because it makes the processing power needed to extract an email address exorbitantly high.
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About This Author:
Ryan Smyth owns Renegade Minds and produces audio software for musicians as well as several freeware programs and technical tutorials for programmers and web masters. He is also the ALTools Evangelist at ESTsoft.
