From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Wed Jul 16 2003 - 21:22:30 MDT
> The best solution I think I've seen for this "thus far" is
> to mangle the address with an image within it. For example
> making the "@" a gif generally fools the address harvesting
> bots but still allows humans to get the message.
There's another solution with embedded javascript putting the email address
text together at the client side, which apparently hides it well from bots.
>
> This does however tend to make nonfunctional one of the more useful
> features of the HTML protocol (i.e. the "mailto:" capability).
>
> But if that is the price we have to pay to defeat the spammers
> until better protocols and laws can be developed -- so be it.
> (An interesting idea would be to promote everyone "creatively"
> modifying their email addresses such that intelligent people
> can decode them but bots cannot. As Spike points out this
> will drive the evolution of bot intelligence -- but there are
> more of us than there are of them (and our aggregate CPU
> capacity still significantly exceeds theirs).
>
I still think that the best way to stop spammers is to encourage active
communication with them. Pick one spam per day, and actually
reply/call/whatever, just to tell them that you are not interested in their
product. Politely. If most people did this, the amount of incoming
rejections would entirely flood their communications channels, and obfuscate
the very low percentage of positive responses that they get. ie: They'd be
crippled by inverse spam. Cost of business goes way up, and becomes
pointless.
For those spams that advertise websites, all I can think is that DDOS
attacks are highly underrated...
Emlyn
> Perhaps we will need to get to the point of randomly altering
> our email addresses and communicating them to "trusted" users
> (akin in some respects to the way that spread spectrum communication
> works) while "novel" communications will have to hurdle multiple
> verification protocols to get our attention.
>
> Robert
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 16 2003 - 21:32:20 MDT