Spam protection

Posted by Nick Gammon on Wed 24 Sep 2003 03:05 AM — 4 posts, 19,765 views.

Nick Gammon Australia Forum Administrator Wed 24 Sep 2003 03:05 AM #0

I am being inundated with spam these days - nothing intentional (unless you call sending spam intentional) - however enough to be a real pain.

I have moved the support from an email-based support system to a web-page form (see the Support button at the top of each page) and now, after reading somewhere that you get more spam if you have your email address listed on a web page, gone through each web page and removed all references to my email address.

If you are using the forum, and are getting more spam than you want, you could try editing your forum profile, and unchecking the box "Show Email" which will stop your email address from being displayed, and thus, harvested, by spammers.

Guest1 USA Sat 27 Sep 2003 06:38 AM #1

Guess it's too late for me to comment on this, but what about parsing emails using iso8859-1 character code so


foo@bar.com

becomes

foo&#64;bar&#46;com

apparently spambots can't harvest them like that, although browsers will still display them as a standard email address.. *shrug*

Poromenos Greece Sat 27 Sep 2003 12:12 PM #2

You'd be surprised what bots are programmed to do... I suppose that they filter that to normal email addresses, or even someone AT foobar DOT com... Many people do that, so I would filter that if I were them :P

Magnum Canada Sat 27 Sep 2003 01:01 PM #3

For an awesome report on spam harvesting, read this report:
http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.pdf