Too Much Junk Mail?
I deleted over 2000 junk e-mails one morning last week! I have junk/spam filters in place that catch a lot of junk mail, and my ISP also has filters that I use, but this doesn't prevent all junk/spam from getting through. It does however, prevent some real emails from getting through! It came to my attention recently that some e-mails have not been able to penetrate these filters, and were flagged as junk! If I haven't responded to an e-mail from you, this may be why... I apologize.
So, what's a company to do? Obfuscate! Yes, that's right, I said Obfuscate! Now, this does not require a fake passport, travelling by night in disguise, or even the need for ”A Beautiful Mind”! It does however, need a certain comfort level with HTML coding and/or Javascript.
“What is Obfuscation?”, you may well ask! Well, according to Wikipedia ”Obfuscation refers to the concept of concealing the meaning of communication by making it more confusing and harder to interpret.”! The obfuscation I’m talking about, is a method of hiding content on your web site from those nasty spider robots that troll the internet looking for e-mail addresses they can add to their database. Hmmm! Do I have your attention now? Are you sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin...
The idea is that you need visitors to your web site to have access to an e-mail address they can contact you through. As soon as you do this that address is also available to Spammers! Now the difference is, that a real visitor is sitting in front of a computer reading your content and clicking on links. A Spammer is actually an internet bot, a program that trolls the internet looking for e-mail addresses that it then copies and takes back to it's creator. So what obfuscation does is it makes your e-mail address available to humans, but unreadable to bots. There are a variety of ways of hiding an e-mail address and each one has advantages and disadvantages. I'm not going to go into detail here, instead I'll provide a link to a site I found most helpful in this regard (see link below). Now, I warn you, I cannot make any guarantees about using the advice and/or ideas this site provides. I can tell you though that my old e-mail addresses are still receiving tons of junk mail, but my new addresses have not received any in over a week! Should you not feel comfortable working with the code of your web site, feel free to contact me to discuss how I may be able to assist you.
Check back soon, as I will be posting some additional tips and news to make your Cyber-Life a little less problematic, and a lot more efficient, and even fun! Thanks for reading, and feel free to forward a link to this article to your friends and/or clients.
Link: Email Harvester Robots, Spam and Email Obfuscation
posted by Julian at 1:07 PM
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