Spambot Beware - Avoidance

Avoidance

(This is a part of the Spambot Beware site)

The best way to not get spam is to not give away your email address. This page describes some ways to hide your email from spambots. The trick is to still leave your email visible to a human visitor, but hidden from a spambot. There are many ways to do this:

• Social skills:
  The first step in avoidance is to not overlook some important social skills. These are some of the most obvious, yet important things to consider:
  • Protecting your address
  • Check your system
  • Social engineering
  • Search the web
  • Pick your address
• HTML tricks:
  There are many ways of hiding your email on a web page. Most of the tricks described here can be combined, and all of them will benefit from some CGI tricks as well.
  • Mailto tags
  • Using a graphic
  • Using HTML entities
  • Spelling it out
  • Fun with tables
  • Pull down menus
  • Javascript
  • Java
  • Using a feedback form
• CGI tricks:
  These are the best way to confuse robots and hide your email address.
  • The Nomailto Program
  • Post gates
• Things NOT to do (and why!)

Things NOT to do (and why!)

There are certain things that you should not do while trying to avoid spambots, for reasons of common sense, politeness, and/or legality:

• Using other people's email addresses
  Just do not do it! However tempted you may be to put down the email address of your enemy, or a person who just spammed you, or even the president, do not so it. It's just not worth it, and the spammer will still end up abusing the Internet along the way to the victim. Putting a spammer's address is bad because:
  1. The spammer usually puts in a fake address, and some poor soul ends up recieving a lot of angry email about spam that they never sent.
  2. The account may have already been cancelled, due to the vigilant efforts of a spam hunter.
  3. The spammer probably has filters in any case, so that they will not receive spam from other spammers.
• Using a fake email name
  Instead of using a fake email name, use a fake domain instead. For example, to obscure greg@example.com, I would not want to use gregNOSPAM@example.com because, while the spam may not reach the user "Greg", it will reach example.com and cause a drain of resources while the system checks to see if there is such a user. Not only that, but every point along the Internet that was travelled to reach example.com has been used as well. A much better choice would be to use greg@exampleNOSPAMQWEQDDASDA.com.

  Strong warning! Make sure that the domain you choose does not exist, and will probably never exist. That is, choose a domain name that nobody will ever use. The example above is a good one - it is highly unlikely that there will ever be a "exampleNOSPAMQWEQDDASDA.com"!!

Spambot Beware: Main page <> Detection <> Avoidance <> Harassment <> Glossary

Avoidance: Main page <> Social <> HMTL <> CGI