Comments on: How to Guarantee Your Site is Blacklisted for Email

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:50:52 +0000

Spammers have very complex crawling mechanisms that are able to harvest email addresses in a number of ways. I’d honestly be weary of ever putting my email address on a web page and would, instead, deploy a contact form.

By: Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:49:02 +0000

Hi Roger,

As a visitor, you’re not in any danger. The issue is for the people who put up this form. A Spammer is able to ‘highjack’ the form and send spam out using it. It’s a terrible practice that the company has deployed on their website.

Doug

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:32:29 +0000

One more question….if I absolutely must put my email address on a page, then what is the best way to do it? Is it safe to use hexidecimal character codes?

Thanks

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:29:05 +0000

Hello,

I found your blog post very interesting, but I don’t understand exactly how this works.

If you fill in this form, how do the spam bots get your email address?

If the site has hidden fields with your email address all the time, then it’s obvious how the spam bots get them.

But when you’re filling it out, don’t you just hit submit, and then the hidden fields go away, right? Does the spam bot have a program set on that page that captures what you type in or what the site puts in the hidden fields while you’re using it?

I don’t understand. Can you please explain this more?

And what can be done? How do you implement a form that spam bots can’t do this too? Is it just a matter of not using hidden fields for email addresses or is it more than that?

Thanks

By: Stephen James

Stephen James — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:31:04 +0000

I believe PDFs are plain text (at least Google can spider them) and your email is in your resume, Doug.