Anyone has technics to take care of email spams?
Don't know what's up these days, there're so many spam regardless of how they got our email address. :

I believe that someone have visited my site and emailed from there to all business email addresses such as edit. I wish we have a legal way to take care of these spammers. I started to be annoyed when my outlook express beeped at 3 am on weekend and I woke up found out it is a spam. Terrible. Any suggestion, anyone?

About the only real answer I have is to use a service like www.spamcop.net

It will check the mail, and trace the people who sent it. Poke a button and a complaint gets sent to their provider. There's no total cure for spam sad to say, but tracking them down and complaining is one place to start. I also make sure that anyone who ever spams me, never gets me using their services.

Greg Moore

Thank You.

A bit late in replying, but it is true that spammers have email "harvesting" programs that crawl through a website pick out any email addresses in the html.

There is a way to stop the harvesting but I've forgotten an example - the basic principle, you hold the email address in Javascript rather than html and at display time, the javascript outputs the email address as normal text. The vast majority of spiders and crawlers skip javascript code thus defeating the email harvestor.

erm, of course, should a harvester happen past this forum and start looking through it, it may well pick up that link you posted in this thread. Not sure how well they do on dynamic pages, but it's something to consider....

Greg Moore

oops ! Very good point Greg. If a spider finds its way to this page and follows ? querystrings (most do nowadays), then it would have no difficulty in harvesting your email address again despite the page being dynamic. Sorry - you have to be careful what you post on the web !

did a little editing of this thread to protect the innocent...

Greg Moore

how about robot.txt

would it help stop harvesting

Also, check this page
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.webhostdir.com

I bought my domain since early of 1998 and had site up but not really in the biz. Some how I can't find my old archieve.
It states on the site that if you have robot.txt on your server, their wayback machine can't crawle. And I do not have the robot.txt right now.

I remember way back in 1998 I had robot.txt on server as I learn that it help leading searchengine to my site. But I didn't know it would also help distinguish se from other kind of crawler.

interesting,

hehe i see that edit. Thank You Very Much!

web.archive.org is a really cool site. Very useful to check up on old information.

As for robots.txt, yes you can use this but this is only looked at by friendly or bonfide spiders like search engines. Spam harvestors couldn't give two hoots about respecting your website and simply barges its way on it quest to grab as many email addresses as it can.

the problem with robots.txt file is that you can make an error with its contents and it will send any useful visiting spider scuttling away. It is possible that this happened or it could be that your site ranking wasn't high enough (please don't take offense - none intended!). Or the content was too complicated or involve links to others sites that no longer exist.

At the end of the day, check the contents of the robots.txt file very carefully - I believe there are testing tools around somewhere where you can check that it is correct.

robot.txt generally only works when whatever's looking at your site decides to follow the rules set out in it. Search engines do as it's better for them to have a set of instructions on what to follow and what not too. Spammers aren't too big on following rules so it's not very effective.

The best way really is just to not have your e-mail address onsite where it can be nabbed. We just use forms ourselves. Of course you still get junk mail, but it's usually from them scanning whois records or trying random domains...

Greg Moore