RE: Re: [OT] Massive spam increase recently?

["Mark Hetherington" <mark.egroups@xxxxxxx>]

Nikola Kasic wrote:
> Do those robots read what's displayed or the links?
> I was thinking of putting small gif picture instead of e-mail
> address and having it linked to
> mailto:joe.bloggs@xxxxxxx
Would that also attract spam? Nik

The robots will actually look for mailto tag and grab the address so
your solution would be unlikely to work. Some will also grab anything
including an @ symbol from the raw HTML but these are currently quite
rare.

Although there are various options, I found the best way was to encode
the address in both the link text and the mailto. So far I have had zero
spam to addresses so encoded. As an example:

<a
href="&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#58;&#110;&#105;&#107;&#111;&#
108;&#97;&#64;&#107;&#97;&#115;&#105;&#99;&#46;&#110;&#101;&#116;">&#110
;&#105;&#107;&#111;&#108;&#97;&#64;&#107;&#97;&#115;&#105;&#99;&#46;&#11
0;&#101;&#116;</a>

This is your email address encoded. It will display correctly in a
browser and the mailto link will still work when clicked. Paste it into
HTML and view the resulting page to test it.

Along with other posters, I have seen a huge increase in the amount of
SPAM recently. There also seems to be a new program to create the emails
making them difficult to identify through simple filtering.

Mark.