A blog about Ruby, Rails and other Tech. Mostly.

20th Jan 2004, 7:21am

Anti email harvesting measures

I just wanted to subscribe to a mailing list (this one). I tried to copy and paste the email address, but it wouldn't work. Then I realised they've used a nice little anti-spam trick... the email address is a gif! Neat way to avoid harvesting, I hadn't thought of it previously.

On my website I used to use a javascript method - using the browser to print the right thing into the DOM in an obfuscated way. Meaning your harvesting software would need to run javascript in order to get the address. But I received a complaint from someone running lynx or some other javascript incapable browser. So now I've gone over to using spamgourmet addresses that automatically expire after a while. It's easy for me to change the address on my site once it becomes the recipient of too much spam.

Of course, we run the excellent spamassassin that filters out any other stuff that comes my way. In all, I get a very nearly no spam at all. Occasionally a Nigerian message evades the assassin, but this is rare.