Re: Accessible "munging" of e-mail addresses on web sites

Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> When all is said and done, I'm still of the belief that the only two 
> viable, long term options are:
> 
> 1) use a contact form (and don't expose the target email address 
> anywhere on the outside, but keep it within the server-side logic)

Matthew: I've done this for a few clients; it works well, it's just 
that, personally, I find contact forms annoying as I like a record of 
all my correspondence in the correct place, in my mail application.

Patrick: 2) keep your email addresses clean and "un-munged", and run 
spam-assassin and junk filtering at your end

Matthew: My business site does just this although I've had to stop using 
server-side filtering due to false-positives.  Just as well I read my 
server logs.  Client-side filtering in Thunderbird seems to be working 
quite well.

Patrick: Anything else will either have usability/accessibility 
implications, and it's only a matter of time until bot writers update 
their code.

Matthew: Very true.  Having written a "harvester" type programme myself, 
to extract metadata from web pages, I can see that finding and restoring 
"munged" addresses would be pretty simple.  The regex may be my friend, 
but it's the spammers' friend too.

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy
South Australia
http://www.kbc.net.au

Received on Monday, 14 February 2005 00:41:59 UTC