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[nycphp-talk] Masking Emails and Avoiding Spam

Chris Snyder chris at psydeshow.org
Fri May 2 09:59:14 EDT 2003


Sexton, David wrote:

>The other thing you could do is publish it as an image, although you may
>have to use a stenciled, wavy style to prevent OCR bots from interpreting
>it.
>  
>
True, but unless you call it email.gif a spammer would have to OCR every 
image on your site.

>I've found that the best solution is to use an HTML form w/ a server-side
>script to send a message.
>
I like the combination approach-- email as image, but links to contact 
form. At least then people who can't read images can still contact you, 
and people who hate webforms can email you.

As a side note if you've never done this, keep the email address that 
the form responds to strictly server-side. There are a lot of old 
form-to-mail scripts out there that accept the email address as a post 
variable, which makes them an excellent outgoing mail server for spammers.

    chris.




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