Author: R.Ringg (26 Jan 05 1:25am)
Running my own domain servers, I've fought spam for a long time. I believe it's already been mentioned in the FAQ but the best way to protect an e-mail address on a web page from being harvested is with a jpg/gif picture. I have one on my web site for about 4 years now and it hasn't received a single piece of spam. A human has to visually see the address and type it into their mail client. Although it's not a simple point and click way for them, it gets me no spam.
I tried an experiment a few months ago just to see if the harvesters were hitting my site. I created a 1 pixel jpg and placed it in a corner of the page with a typical mailto link pointing to harvester@my-personal-domain.DOM. Even moving the mouse over the area I can't make the url pop up so there's no chance of a human ever seeing the link unless they're bored and look at the source. Within 24 hours I had 2 hits to the e-mail address but both were virus attachments. Since I never created the account in my mail server they just bounced but it was an interesting experiment.
My firewall blocks many abusive spam ips. The ones that do get through then need to get through the mail server filters and I have very heavy filters. Not something a big company could use on their own mail servers. I block the majority of the asia/pacific IPs. Many middle east and europe ip's and domains are also blocked. Since there's no way I'll ever get real e-mail from any of them, the filter blocks are wonderful. With about 12 current e-mail addresses on my server, I might get 1 spam every couple of months through the filters.
** Shameless plug **
Since many internet users are starting to fight back in various ways against all the abuse we have to put up with here's another fight back web site.
www.419eater.com
It's for those of you who contstantly get those "$26,000,000 in a Nigerian bank" scam letters and want to fight back.
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