G'day there.

I came across this website called Spam Stop at: http://www.spamstop.org/

At a quick look, the people seem to have a two pronged approach to beating the e-mail spammers.

1)  They have a free code generator where you insert your e-mail address and it gives you an encoded version to copy and paste.

2)  This is the one I'm a bit worried about. They have a series of pages, lightly loaded with fake e-mail addresses to pollute the harvested address lists and overload the bandwidth of the spammers. You just put a link to their site on one of your pages.

Nothing to it. I break into a fit of giggling, just thinking about it.

But is it safe from a SEO viewpoint?

It would be good to hear from Spam Stop himself, if he's around, as well as from other members who may have an angle on this.

Mind you: No forum spamming and excessive self promotion.

Regards,
Laurie.

I've played with that one before -- but, if you have Firefox, they have a pretty kewl add-on extension that instantly generates random emails for you also, and it's called temporary inbox

that's what Yahoo, hotmail etc is for - disposable email addresses...

Im trying a Clint Eastwood approac, i found this app that sends a ton of emails back to the spammer. All i need is an address. "in all the excitement... i forgot how many times i clicked okay.... so i gotta ask you 'spammer'... are you feeling... lucky... punk"

Ryan_steyn wrote:

i found this app that sends a ton of emails back to the spammer. All i need is an address.....

You should think about 2 things.
1. It is very easy to fake the from address of an email.
2. Most spammers use some address they found somewhere else as their from address.

I often receive emails bounced back as spam that I never sent, because the email 'from' address the spammer used was mine.

Ryan, as much as I applaud your attitude, your method is more likely to harm legitimate email users than it will the person who really sent the spam.

All i need is an address.....

No worries bean, im well aware of how the spammers go about there business, thats why im waiting for an email add i know is a spammers before i launch my attck

Nah! This is more inovative than those old type ideas. The idea is to put out bait for e-mail address harvesting bots to collect, themselves. Collect by the hundreds, thousands. More than you could ever create using Hotmail.

Sounds great to me. Just worried about the SEO consequences of being linked to what may be considered a bad neighbourhood.

It would be good for the gurus to have a look at the site. Looks very well done to my inexperienced eye.

Perhaps Stop Spam would like to address the bad neighbourhood question.

Regards,
Laurie.

Just curious as to why you would put your email on your site at all? It is VERY easy to code a form and grab a free form processor and away you go....

I tend to not advise putting email addys on sites... just contact forms...

Hi Laurie

By 'bad neighbourhood' do you mean the fact that generating dynamic pages may have an adverse affect from Google etc?

The dynamically generated pages on the SpamStop site should not be trawled by search engine spiders as they contain <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/> and the robot.txt also has the line 'Disallow: /-h/' (/-h/ being the directory where the dynamic pages are).

In other words, a legitimate search engine spider should not index those pages, so it should not have any adverse effect.

thegyspsy wrote:

Just curious as to why you would put your email on your site at all? It is VERY easy to code a form and grab a free form processor and away you go....

I tend to not advise putting email addys on sites... just contact forms...

Hmm… I look at forms as something non-human and machine like. I don’t know if there are any hard numbers on this but many visitors don’t have confidence or trust in forms.

Trust is super important and an email adds to the trust factor because they feel it will at least go to someone’s Inbox. If the email doesn’t come back people will take the first stem towards trusting you.

When I see a form… I feel exactly the same as I do when I see a site that does not list a contact phone number. I think poor service, email spam, scam, etc

Fine..then explain on your form/contact page EXACTLY  why this is te way for contact. Everyone understands SPAM and many that hadn't thought about it would respect you for bringing this important point to light...

How's that?

he he

FINE... LOL I will do it when I get to WS

I used forms, but even after asking on this forum for a way tpo stop the spammers USING the form to generate spam, then I don't see how a form is any better.

I'd like to have a way!!

My next move is yes, not to have an email link, but have an image showing the email address and get people to type that into their email address line. The only concerns I have is that people will find that too much bother and noth bother....

I don't have any Spam problems with the contact form on my site.

sure the image option works, but may be less user friendly than a form.

It is the harvesters one needs to worry about that patrol the web 24/7 for email addys... go over to Scriptlance, you will even see such funnies looking for such apps here and there....

Remember, I started in web development, so had to learn about hackers..b4 black hatters... Now we have a staff of 15 TALENTED programmers that are a good back up to keep us educated :0)

You CAN set up honeypots for hacker too... hee hee...great way to learn :0)

Sooo... beware of the bots... use a contact form

yeah, but the form gets hijacked - we had a looong thread here not that long ago and it seemed there was no solution.

PLUS = in my business people need to send me attachments...

Just curious as to why you would put your email on your site at all? It is VERY easy to code a form and grab a free form processor and away you go....

Where would one find one of these form processors? and do they work in html or will ie stop it dead in its tracks? I tried an html form (simple mailto form) and it blew up in my face.

I too would LOVE to know where to find a form processor.  Please share!

Also, forgive my ignorance (and intrusion) - does it not do any good to leave your web address off of the website but have a link that includes the mailto code? 

Can spammers still get your email address since it's viewable in the source code?

(yes, I'm still a newbie, lol)

Thanks!
BasketLady

Yes, the source code IS where they harvest the e-mail addresses.

I was told that you can prevent harvesting by encoding your e-mail address with html character entities (&#65 = 'A').  I don't know for certain how effective this is, and I imagine the hackers could program around this if it was commonly used, but we decided to try it out.  I have that set up on my binoware site / contact us page if you want to see what I mean (look at the source).

Ok, so this is probably a dumb question - but after looking at the source code I have to ask:

I'm presuming there is an html character entity for every letter in the alphabet - so, you have the character entity for each letter, and that spells out the email address? 

(feel like I'm speaking in secret code, lol)

Thanks!
BasketLady