Spam Busters!
How to defeat the Junk-Mail Spammers....
We all suffer from this problem. Unsolicited junk-mail “spam” appearing in our
EMail in-box. One friend of mine receives 50 or 60 of these every day (yes....
fifty to sixty!!!).
How do these pests even get hold of our E-Mail addresses? The most common
way for these junk-mail spammer parasites to get hold of E-Mail addresses is that they use
automated robot software programs that are programmed to search through pages
on web sites, “harvesting” any E-Mail addresses that they find on the
web pages, and adding them to their database of E-Mail addresses that are then used for
their “direct-mailing advertising campaigns”, often with these lists of addresses
being sold and traded to many spammers.
Is there any way that we can protect ourselves from these robotic “harvesters”?
Yes! There are ways to foil these spammers, and these methods are in use on this
New Millennium Essences website. For details, read on.....
All of the E-Mail addresses on this web site are encoded into the web pages using
Javascript, in a way that is designed to make them invisible to these robotic parasites,
but still visible to human eyes, and still usable by humans as “clickable EMail
links”. Unless you look at the underlying HTML source code of the web pages,
you, a human looking at these pages through your web browser, cannot tell the difference,
but, to a robotic EMail address “harvester” it appears as if there are no EMail
addresses on the page!
For most people who use this web site, this will not cause any problems, but, if your
web browser is not able to read Javascript programs, you will not be able to see any of
the E-Mail addresses that appear on our website pages. If this is happening for
you, the reason may be that your web browser is not set to support Javascript, or you have
a very old computer with an early version of a web browser program that does not support
Javascript.
If this is the case for you, what you will have to do is to manually write down our E-Mail
address as displayed on the graphical image below, and use this address to E-Mail us.....
So, how do we implement this “spam-proofing” of EMail addresses on our
web pages? The method that is used on this New Millennium Essences website
is as described on
this page of the DevWebPro website, as developed by Dan Thies.
Dan describes how to insert a Javasript program into your web page, with the Javascript
set up to place the EMail address at the desired position on the page, with the EMail
address in the underlying source code of the page broken up into pieces that will not be
able to be recognised as an EMail address by the robots that the spammers use, and
“harvested”. Thank-you Dan!
Briefly, here is an example of how to implement a Javascript program to place a clickable
EMail link on a webpage.....
<script language=javascript> <!--
</script>
<script language=javascript> <!--
var username = "username"; var hostname = "yourdomain.com";
var linktext = "Click Here To Send Me Email"; document.write("<a
href=" + "mail" + "tox" + username
+ "@" + hostname + ">" + linktext +
"</a>") //--> </script>
To be continued shortly, with details of how you can use this protection method on your own
web site, or to suggest this to any of your friends or colleagues who have web sites.
