Webmaster Email A Magnet For Spam

[Andy]

Do you find that anyone@yourdomain is a magnet for search-engine positioning spam ?

I just downloaded my emails and there were 5 in a row from an unknown source to Readingfreeads with the title "search engine traffic". Wrom: JEXXIMQZUIVO

It seems that any email contact address I publish is a magnet for search engine promotion spam. The latest has links to seo-profits.con (m>n to avoid link enhancement)

Nowadays I tend to use an image displaying any contact email and imbed a useless email address in the html for the email crawlers.

[Hope]

Andy, it drives me nuts because I am an SEO and I still get those spam mails. They send it to my SEOAnalysis.com domain too. It is funny and stupid at the same time.

[spherica]

It no different then getting emails to exchange links with a directory.... I get on average about 30 emails a day (to various accounts) emails wanting to exchange links with one of the directories I admin at, with their site.

Most I ignore, a few I check out, and also waste my time responding to a few telling them that all they have to do is submit.

[SensoVision]

I've get hitted by such mails as well, probably everyone did, even those who don't even have a site... If you've read this thread you'll see that Google get such mails as well :p

[lostingermany]

I receive those emails all the time. When one of my kids sign up for chat or some other websites they receive them, too.

[larryweiss]

I really have a solution. http://www.proles.net/emailencoder/
There are others too.

[justjeni]

These are such a royal pain - I get so much crap like that, too! Often the line before the domain name is just a bunch of jibberish, and so is the subject line.  And virus's - I get so many with virus's attached - arg! But it seems impossible to get rid of them. i've tried everything and while spam filters may be all right for some, I find them more of a hassle, plus I always miss a legit e-mail or two, so I gave up on those, too. 

[MyWebTeks]

We all get a lot of spam in our emails. This is just something that comes with being online and get worse everyday.

There is a way to curb some of it though. First of all NEVER use any email account that you don't wish to get spam at in any forum, chat room or any other online location and only give it to friends and family or trusted business associates.

Some of you especially the newer webmasters may be thinking "Ok but how will people contact me then?". The answer is forms. Use forms on your site especially on your contacts pages for people to fill out to send you a message. Not just any form though. You need to use a form that will not show your email address anywhere in the code. Simply making the email address a hidden attribute will not work. Anybody can view the source of your page and read those hidden attibutes as well as the spiders and bots. Needless to say, you should never set the action of the form to use your email address either.

What you need is a secure form that will not show your email address anywhere in the code. Most forms that do this are forms that run off php. You can find some good ones at http://www.hotscripts.com We have some for our visitors to download from us at our Ezdownloads Engine as well. You will need to register there though if you wish to download any of our free scripts. Registration is free as well.

Another thing you can do on your site is to add a simple script that will add a link for the bots and spiders to follow that contains and unending number of bogus email addresses. They will get stuck in this script and crash the spider or bot because the bot or spider will attempt to save all the email addresses that the script generates which will be impossible to do because the email addresses are unending which causes the bots to crash. They never get to see your email address because it is never presented to them. They are all created dynamically but the bot doesn't know this and attempts to crawl all of the bogus addresses. You can find this script at hotscripts.com as well in the php section.

Finally...never reply to any of the spam that you get. Not even to tell them to take you off their list. More times than not, this is just a ploy to see if the email address the message got sent to is valid. Don't even open the email....just delete it. The reason for this is that there are many programs that the spammers use that will tell them when and if an email they sent was opened. If you open it you will tell them that the emaill address they sent their spam to is valid and will continue to spam you and no amount of nasty emails or supposed remove pages will get you removed from their list.

As far as email filters. They are junk and useless. There are many ways to get around the use of filters and the most notorious spammers are well aware of them and know how to get around them. Until the ISP's and domain registrars get together on how to solve the issue of spamming and go after them, there is not much else we can do about it except use the mothods outlined above.

If any of you need help on setting any of this up, let me know and I will try to help out as much as I can. Just keep in mind though, our paying customers come first.

[Juan]

I really have a solution. http://www.proles.net/emailencoder/
There are others too.

Hi, I am the person who wrote that encoder you link to as http://www.proles.net/emailencoder/. I have written a new and improved site, http://www.addressmunger.com . It still has the old encoder, and it can now also encode your email address into a javascript function for the (slightly) more advanced users. There is also a new tool that you can use to encode as much text as you want on your page. I would greatly appreciate it if you would update your link.

Thanks,
Juan Rodriguez.
AddressMunger.com

[Hope]

Juan,

Thank you for sharing your encoder with us. These are the greatest things. They do take a lot of headache away from the webmaster. It also help prevent bot scraping.

[dominicanpapi82]

Juan,

Thank you for sharing your encoder with us. These are the greatest things. They do take a lot of headache away from the webmaster. It also help prevent bot scraping.

Hey, no prob. It was fun making the page. The reason I made it is because it's so hard to find an easy-to-run address munger/address encoder that is all client side, i.e. doesn't require some other website to be up in order to either display your email address or decode whatever links they have you put on your page.

The site looks nicer now, and is much more easily surfable with all links on top of the page. I'd love to get any tips anyone has on how to improve the site. Things like other services AddressMunger.com can provide, and really any other minor or major site improvement ideas and tips are appreciated.

[Hope]

My only frustration with encoded email addresses is if you need to update the addresses often. I work on a lot of hotel websites. there is high turn over at some of the hotels, so I have to update email addresses once or twice a month sometimes. Having the emails encrypted means I have to do it each time. So, I hate to say it, but my clients don't always get the benefits.

[dominicanpapi82]

My only frustration with encoded email addresses is if you need to update the addresses often. I work on a lot of hotel websites. there is high turn over at some of the hotels, so I have to update email addresses once or twice a month sometimes. Having the emails encrypted means I have to do it each time. So, I hate to say it, but my clients don't always get the benefits.

One thing I was thinking was writing a downloadable program, so all you have to do is click on some icon in your taskbar, munge, cut, and paste. Of course I have to learn how to write a downloadable program first... 

[Hope]

That would be great!! I am sure you could sell that and make a bit of moeny.