Project Honeypot has posted a document with some great techniques for hiding your email address on web pages, blogs, etc. from spambots: “How to Avoid Being Harvested by Spambots.”
Some techniques they suggest:
Munging your address:
Add “remove this” type text to the email address or write it in a way that requires human cognition to extract it correctly.
jsmith@REMOVETHISexample.com
jsmithDELETEBEFORESENDING@example.com
jsmith @example.Zom (replace Z with C)
jsmith -at-example.com
jsmith (at)example.com
jsmith AT example DOT com
Advanced munging
Replace letters with ASCII code. @ = “@”
Complete Obfuscation
#1: Post your email address in a GIF, png, JPEG or other standard web graphic file.
#2: Render you email address into Javascript. Their article includes an edit box where you can enter an address to demonstrate:
jsmith@yahoo.com would be rendered as:
There is the project’s description of what they do:
“Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.”
It’s a great mission, plus ya gotta love any group that sells underwear with their logo/message as a fund raiser:
Tom Kelchner