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What is Anti-Spam Contact
Anti-Spam Contact is a convenient and seamless way to help prevent email address harvesting for spam-bots. Don't know what this means? Read on...
Why protect my email address?
The US Federal Trade Commision has an interesting article on their web site showing exactly how big a problem email harvesting for spamming has become. An excerpt from this article follows:
"According to the investigators, spammers typically use computer programs that search public areas on the Internet to compile, capture, or otherwise "harvest" lists of email addresses from web pages, newsgroups, chat rooms, and other online destinations.
To find out which fields spammers consider most fertile for harvesting, investigators "seeded" 175 different locations on the Internet with 250 new, undercover email addresses. The locations included web pages, newsgroups, chat rooms, message boards, and online directories for web pages, instant message users, domain names, resumes, and dating services. During the six weeks after the postings, the accounts received 3,349 spam emails. The investigators found that:
86 percent of the addresses posted to web pages received spam. It didn't matter where the addresses were posted on the page: if the address had the "@" sign in it, it drew spam.
86 percent of the addresses posted to newsgroups received spam.
Chat rooms are virtual magnets for harvesting software. One address posted in a chat room received spam nine minutes after it first was used."
There are a number of ways to reduce the chances of your email address being harvested, but once it has been harvested you can never stop the spam. The address once harvested becomes part of a spam database that can be passed around, bought and sold, and generally abused. I have had some email addresses that receive upwards of 50 spam emails a day. Spam filters work to a degree, BUT they can also filter genuine emails. As a result I manually confirm each spam email before it is permanantly deleted. Time consuming.
The trick is to prevent your email address from being harvested in the first place. How? Simply put.. DONT HAVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS ONLINE! Hmm, that's not really very useful though.. so we look at methods of masking your email from email harvesting. Having done plenty of research on this, it was aparent that many of the common methods had serious drawbacks. For example a favoured method is simply to replace email links on your site with an image that displays your email... downside: the user must type the email address themselves and spell it correctly , you also interrupt the flow of your site, as the convenient click to contact us method has become very manual. If you were to add a mailto: link to the image, then you are back at square one with an exposed email address.
There are a number of methods, all of which have advantages and disadvantages and differing degrees of complexity. I would suggest a quick google search on the topic of masking email addresses or preventing email harvesting, you will get LOTS of info and plenty of reading.
It occured to me that for much of my work I needed a quick and easy solution to this problem, AND one that wasn't going to interfere with the ease of use of each site I used it in. So I designed Anti-Spam Contact.
What it does
The problem with having an email address displayed on your site, is that if the string of text looks even remotely like an email address most advanced harvesters can pick it up. Eg, contactme@NOSPAMmydomain.com is only going to stop the basic harvesters, any good email harvester will realise NOSPAM needs to go, and reassemble the email address correctly. The more creative of us can come up with ways to write emails that confound the harvesters.... but also our visitors. How convenient is having to edit an email address to remove bits that shouldn't be there when you click on a link? Personally i usually just close the email and give up unless it is an important matter.
Anti-Spam Contact is a custom Flash movie that uses action script to mask your email address and still display a visual representation of the address. The beauty of this this method is that
- The email address is never included in its entirety
- The non alpha numeric characters are not actually ever indisplayed in text form
- The email address is compiled in realtime
- Only when the user clicks the flash button does it actually generate the active email link.
This prevents even advanced email harvesting software from ever detecting a string of text that could be interpreted as an email address.
The waranty
There is no guaranteed method of beating this kind of problem, as it evolves as fast as the minds behind the harvesting software become aware of new methods of masking. In my mind Anti-Spam Contact has these advantages.
- It is not HTML, which is what most harvesters are searching for an email link within
- The .swf flash document is protected and thus the source code cannot be easily viewed, if at all
- Each Anti-Spam Contact button is created specifically for the client and has unique attributes
All in all, I offer no guarantee that this is unbreakable, but it is certainly an effective and user friendly method to help prevent your email address from falling prey to harvesting. I use Anti-Spam Contact (in some form) on every site that I work on. It is a simple low cost and visitor friendly way to fight harvesting.
Important notes
Anti-Spam Contact is only for prevention of harvesting. If you already get spam at that email address there is no point using it as your email address is already "out there" in some spam database or harvested list.
There are many places you may expose your email address to harvesting, such as forums and newsgroups etc. Be SAFE with your email address or use a second email for "exposed" or "unsafe" places.
If you already have a spam problem, create a new email address and then shield it using Anti-Spam Contact (or another technique) when putting it on your web pages.