Can this be protected?

[Bill Mullen]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004, Tilly, Lawrence wrote:

> Now, I've heard of bots similar to what search engines use that crawl
> the web and scour for email addresses on web sites.  It sounds very
> reasonable of a tactic and if it doesn't actually happen now I'm sure it
> will very soon.  I have also heard suggestions on how to present your
> email so people can decipher it but automated systems wouldn't recognize
> it as an address ( such as writing:  "lawrence AT foo.com"  vs.
> "lawrence at foo.com" ).  Normally this is fine except for two things:
>    1.  Some friends and family members are a little less technically
> inclined than others and may not figure out how to translate that
> without an obvious and distracting explanation.
>    2.  I would really like to simplify things (for those same members)
> by using the mailto: tag, but I don't know if the actual HTML code
> including the mailto would be scanned by spam-crawlers and defeat the
> whole thing.

There are a number of methods to do this, which involve substitution of 
ASCII codes for the actual characters themselves; here is one:

http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/content.php?pageid=2609

While it is not impossible by any means, it is IMHO unlikely that a bot
would be written to waste time trying to deconstruct such an obfuscated
address, when there are so many plain-text addresses out there which can
be far more readily (and, therefore, speedily) harvested.

Another option would be to present a link to a page containing a form that 
the user can fill out to send you their message; this would enable you to 
avoid making the address itself visible (or otherwise available) at all.

HTH!

-- 
Bill Mullen   moon at lunarhub.com   MA, USA   RLU #270075   MDK 8.1 & 9.0
The engineer is neither optimist nor pessimist. He sees the proverbial
half-full/empty glass and says, "The glass is twice as big as there is
any need for it to be."