Preventing spam (The Wilful Sunflower)

People complain about spam all the time. Bloggers complain about spam too. What frustrates me is that sometimes we practically invite spam without realising it.

How so, you ask?

You have a blog. So do I. We put our email addresses up on our blogs. Even if it's not really on your blog - like, say, you have a link that says, "Email me!", your email address is in the HTML - in an <a href="mailto:..."> link. Yes?

This is where the danger lies:

Spam bots are software used by spammers to automatically "crawl" the web, (and newsgroups, chat rooms, IRC, instant messager and other contact databases) and locate any and every email address they can find. They then record all these harvested email addresses into a database to be used for plying the evil trade of the spammer.

- Spam Bots - And How To Avoid Them

The article goes on to say that, even if you were to write, for example, example@NOSPAMexample.com (which would require people to manually remove the "NOSPAM" portion, of course), many modern spambots have been programmed to recognise email addresses written in these forms - and to reword them.

If you want a "clickable" link, it appears that the safest way to generate one is to use Javascript. I've been blogging for a year now, and, thanks to Bob (who gave me the script), I've used Javascript for my "contact me" link at the left almost from the first. I've yet to receive any spam at that particular email address. Amazing!

Of course, the articles I've read all keep on reminding me that not everybody has javascript turned on in their browsers. However, I figure that if they don't, they can always leave a comment instead of writing me an email! ;)

(However, javascript is also required for third-party commenting systems such as Haloscan, Backblog and Enetation. Hmmm.)

Here are some javascript generators. Key in your email address, click the button, and get your code:

If you have your own domain, you can use this code instead (also javascript):
Reconstructing your address

The advantage of having a clickable link is that it's just easier for visitors to email you. They click, and Outlook Express - or their desktop email application - pops up.

However, if you're willing to forgo a clickable link, create a graphic image - a .gif - with your email address and simply display it where it can be seen. Visitors will be able to see it but spambots won't... at least, not the current generation of spambots anyway. (They're evolving all the time, sort of like nasty viruses.)

[ *UPDATE*: Thanks to Ab.Er.Rant for reminding me, I forgot to put this in:

It is also possible to display your email in this form:

example [at] example [dot] com

However...

It is a simple thing for a spam bot programmer to write the bot to recognise when the sequences [at] and [dot] are in close proximity, and put the email address back in place again.
- Spam Bots - And How To Avoid Them

I think that they also know about (at) instead of @ as I used that for a while but still got junk which I could trace back to that source.
- Anti-Spam

Some people paraphrase their email address--spelling out "at" and "dot com"--or insert extraneous characters intended to trip up spambots. Not only do such techniques look unprofessional, they provide very little protection. Any decent spambot can decode them and get your actual email address.
- Building Your Personal Anti-Spam Strategy

So you see that that particular method won't really work either. I checked the date of the articles - they're dated Jan 2003, Apr 2003 and Nov 2002 respectively, so they're pretty up-to-date. ]

Otherwise, you can insert a "feedback form" on your site using any of the third-party clients listed here (or this one, which isn't in said list). Visitors fill out a form, and the information is then sent to you. This keeps your email off the code on your page.

Finally, if you have a personal website, you could create a "contact me" page and put in this tag inside the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags:

This is thought to be pretty effective. The commercial search engines will ignore it as requested so the harvesters that go by this route will not see them. Many stand-alone spiders will also honour this request as well, not out of any consideration for you but because there are people on the web who hate spam with a vengeance and have invented special web pages designed to kill harvesting robots. These pages can have serious consequences on genuine search engines as well so they keep these off by using the meta tag. The effectiveness of this is still being debated by the experts.

- Anti-Spam