Avoiding spammers? 2

[cian]

Hi guys,

I was wondering how everybody avoids spammers on their domains. I really want to display email addresses on my websites but I need to avoid spammers. I have a new site coming online in a few weeks and it needs to be as accessible as possible by that I mean it needs to be contact friendly with displayed emails and contact forms.

I am creating an "anti-spam" page to try to fool the bots but I know very little about how they work.

Can you tell me what works for you? I'd appreciate any advice you can give me.

Thanks guys 'n gals


?É

enzo@endamcg.com

http://endamcg.com

 

[ayjaycee]

It's almost impossible to tell if it works (I was getting spam before I started using it ;-)), but I use wpoison -

http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/

- on my site. One by one, the penguins steal my sanity. X-)

http://www.tanda.f2s.com

 

[Wullie]

Hi,

I also use a program that simulates e-mail addresses to serve to the robots.

You can find it at

http://www.shavenferret.com/scripts

This script can be customised to how many email you want to generate etc. I currently use 2000.

One problem with it is that, some email robots scan only .html, .htm, .shtml, .asp and .txt files which unfortunatly does not let it access most scripts of this kind, including the one I mentioned above.

The way I combat this problem is to generate the file with 2000 email addresses then save the source code as a .html file which will almost certainly get indexed. I also leave the cgi link so that "stupid" (Most of them are) robots get served both pages giving them a total of 4000 fake email addresses that will all bounce when they try to send them.

If you are going to link to a page of this type, make sure that you either label the link so that real users will know not to access it or include it in a transparent gif 1px by 1px.

If you want to try this script out to see how it works, you can access it directly on my site at

http://www.searchit-now.co.uk/cgi-bin/emailkiller/contactus.cgi

Just refresh the page to see it generate all addresses again.

Using both types of files definatly works as I personally scan my own pages with a spam robot and get over 2000-4000 addresses returned depending on which types of files I index.

(Note: I only scan my own pages for testing purposes, so please don`t anyone moan at me about scanning theirs.)

Hope this helps Wullie

http://www.survivorhelp.co.uk

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

 

[cian]

Thanks ayjaycee, thanks wullie, I was actually checking out wpoison yesterday.

Just got my first spam this morning! Sh1t! I get hundreds on hotmail but this is first to this domain!


Thanks for the info!!

É enzo@endamcg.com

http://endamcg.com

 

[Wullie]

IT WASN'T ME... LOL

If you sign up for certain search engines etc then you will receive spam, seems to be a matter of life...

One thing never to do is reply stating "UNSUBSCRIBE" and never click on the link "Click here to remove yourself from our mailing list." All you are doing is letting them know that your email is valid and exists.

Instead of the above, if you are using hotmail, click on the message and click BLOCK..

There is a way that you can alter your email address and then you can tell who sold your email on..

I can't remember the exact syntax but it is something like mynamehere<mydomain>@mydomain.com

If the above email address is placed on your site and you receive spam in that above address then obviously someone has extracted it from your site. If you do the same when you sign up for something (change the <mydomain> to whatever but make sure you use a different one for each site. eg. <google> then when you receive spam, you know where it has came from...

As I said, I cannot remember the exact syntax but I will search until I do..

Hope this helps Wullie

http://www.survivorhelp.co.uk

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

 

[cian]

Thanks Wullie, helps a lot!!

I installed that cgi fom Shavenferret, actually put on 3 versions of it under different names. Fingers crossed!

Thanks for yer help!


É

http://endamcg.com