Are you one of the people plagued by tons of SPAM in your inbox?
Ever wondered where it all comes from?
True, we sometimes make mistakes ourselves by signing up for stuff that we should have been more careful about, that’s life. However, most spammers don’t need our active participation to get our email addresses, they rely on a few basic loopholes instead.
So, did you ever consider that your website might be an open door for spammers?
Web scraping: is an easy, automated way for anyone to collect data in bulk from pretty much any website on the internet – using software that is easily available and often free, the system crawls large numbers of web pages typically seeking out contact details and adding them to a database for later use.
Whilst the software can be used for legitimate purposes such as price comparison sites and news gathering purposes, it is often misused to build lists for bulk emailing purposes.
If your email address appears on your website as a clickable link, it is very easy for these automated systems to detect it for what it is by reading the underlying code on the web page.
You have to have contact details on your website right? Otherwise, there’s no point in having the site in the first place! So what’s the answer?
Suggestions to prevent scraping:
These range from making the email non-clickable, to using some coding ‘tricks’ to make it less obvious to the mechanical scraping tools.
Some examples follow they rely on disguising the @ sign in your address.
Use <code>
Adding <code> around the @ sign will put most spambots at bay. <code> as defined in HTML puts any text in between it in a monospace font. Other than that its effect is nil.
news<code>@</code>mydomain.com
Use Special Characters
The easiest way is to replace the @ sign in your email address with the HTML code that represents it “@” but it’s still not totally secure.
Put it in your code inside a link or just as a text email address:
Link: <a href=”mailto:news@mydomain.com”>Email Us!</a>
Text email: Email us at: news@mydomain.com
Alternatively just use an email form to contact you.
But be aware that human spammers are able to use the form as well as regular surfers. There is little or no defense against a human being who is using the form maliciously.
To deter automated spambots, however, your contact form should have a puzzle or captcha-code to determine whether or not the form is being filled in by a person, these often take the form of a simple sum like 1+1= more complex versions may involve setting up a predefined answer in the form itself such as what is the capital of Paris?
Another effective form of security element is the Honeypot method – this involves the form having a field that is hidden to humans but can be seen by the spam software – any form that has this hidden field filled in, is deleted automatically.
A form that doesn’t have any kind of security attached is an open door for spam.