Prevent Spammers from Harvesting Your Email Address
February 1, 2007 · Print This Article
Do you list your email address on your website? If so, while you’re making it easy for prospective clients to contact you, you may also be making it a cinch for spammers to harvest your email address.
“Spam bots” are cyber-robots that automatically visit websites, look for clusters of words in email format (something@something.something), harvest them, and add them to lists that spammers sell to other spammers. It stinks that we have to find tricks to work around these kinds of problems, doesn’t it?
Here are some tips to stop spam-bots from taking advantage of your friendliness and accessibility. They all involve removing your traditionally formatted email address from your website and doing one of these instead:
- Use a contact form that visitors can fill out and automatically arrives in your inbox when they submit it. That’s the approach I take here at Mediator Tech.
- Replace text with an image of your email address.
- Type your email address in an unconventional way. I’m seeing a lot of “name [at] address [dot] com” on websites these days. I suspect the spam-bots will catch up with this approach and also know from experience it confuses some visitors.
- Use a javascript-coded email that confuses spam-bots. I’ve seen some who swear by this approach and others who say spam-bots have already caught up. Sigh.
- Create a special email account that you use only for email coming from your website, then periodically toss it out and get a new one.
For more information on most of these options, visit the good, detailed article Preventing Spam: Bulletproof Solutions over at the Smashing Magazine site. Then go remove your email from your site!
Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
Hi - I’ve been surfing around the net trying to find a solution to my spammer problem. I havce tried some of the tips you described here such as j-peg image on the webpage for my email address and an inquiry form for clients but still the spammer are hi-jacking my email accounts. I constantly get mail failure notices for mail I just did not send from my personal email account which is not listed on my website. And now I am starting to received spam mail via my form as well.
My question now is can you advise my how to introduce one of those form alphanumeric authenticators? I asked my webhost and they were clueless.
Hi, David - Frustrating that we have to spend our time trying to keep ahead of the Internet’s underbelly, isn’t it?
I’ve heard that the jpeg and other methods don’t work so well anymore because spammers are sending live people to sites to harvest. As long as they can see and interpret it, then they can harvest it. And I’ve had the same problem with using an online form that you have. Sigh.
When you say “form alphanumeric authenticator,” I think you’re asking about a captcha, yes? The link I added here leads to a Wikipedia page that has some resources at the very bottom…I hope one of them will be useful to you. You might also try The Official Captcha site. Good luck!