[Rockn]

I found a web site HERE that has a great suggestion for fighting the spammers at their own game. All of the mailto addresses in the page are either invalid email addresses or addresses of known spammers. I have placed it on my web site and intend on adding addresses to it whenever I get spammed. To all the spammers out there....HARVEST AWAY!!

[Fyzbo]

So let me get this straight. This site is trying to clog up spammers by making them find fake addresses? Will spammers even care? Do you think this will make a significant difference?

[Rockn]

If they get thousands or non deliverable messages I am sure they will get quite annoyed. If a spammer hiself is on the list they will also get spam from another spammer sending out spam. It is an entertaining thought that a spammer is in effect spamming him/her self.

P.S. I see you haven't put the unicode charachters in your email address have you? Still getting spammed?

[Fyzbo]

Actually I changed my e-mail address. I am redisigning my web site so I haven't changed it yet.

[ddraigcoch]

Another one to see is http://www.spywareinfo.com/harvest_project/

[Fyzbo]

I may just have to participate in this.

[brendandonhu]

Those actually P.O the spammer, but if you just want protection for your email address on a web page, Encrypt It .

[brendandonhu]

Also, I searched through the source code and found the Spambait Pages . It starts, Kewl You found My Easter Egg. Goes on about how I clicked an invisible link and im not a human. The pages with the email addresses have real content on them with addresses throughout it. Dont know why they cant just fill the page with 30,000 random emails.

[cybergum]

I saw this done on a blog a few weeks back. For your e-mail address, simply put "Username AT host.com". The person e-mailing you just replaces AT with @, and spam bots can't harvest your address

[brendandonhu]

The problem there is, some people might not email you if its not a link. If you get that in a link, they wont bother to look at it and it will bounce. I think that compliance with robots.txt should be mandatory. After all, I saw a guest book once that was being crawled by a bot, and every time I refreshed it the bot had followed the post link and the messages showed the Unix Timestamp.

[ddraigcoch]

Anti Spam Script (***) Maker is good! I use it all the time when designing websites http://assmaker.mybravenet.com/

[Rockn]

The problem there is, some people might not email you if its not a link

99% of these bots are automated and all the spammer does is put in a list os web addresses or an entire domain and it will scour every web page for mailto functions or things that qualify as an email address. They are collected and put into a database and the mailings begin flying with little or no intervention from a live person whatsoever. Companies also harvest the email addresses and resell them and they are just as bad as the spammer sending the email. It is the harvesting of the email addresses I am talking about in general, not the way you encrypt it or display it on your web site.

[brendandonhu]

I downloaded a trial version of a harvester bot once. I ran it on yahoo.com and got 1000s of addies in just a few minutes.