This page is dedicated to bots. The most dedicated readers of my blog. Come bots, read my e-mail address from here so that I may rejoice in spam on my fake mail boxes.
Here is the test setup. I created half a dozen brand new mailbox at my domain labeled after not so random names. This page will sit here allowing bots to collect the e-mail addresses and we will see after a while how much spam any of them get.
- Roland@andamp.org - This is the base e-mail address, it is easy to read by humans and it is easy to read by bots. This should get the most spam and will allow me to see when bots actually start harvesting this page.
- Hector at andamp dot org - I am not sure how these e-mail address don't get spam, maybe they do? Seems like it is popular to write your e-mail address this way, but it would also be trivial to modify e-mail harvesting scripts to grab them.
- Julius
laughed
@Octavian one day.
andamp.com - this (should) look like a plain e-mail address, but if you look at the source there is a div tag in the middle of it and the css hides it. I think this may be one of the most readable and best one.
- E-mail address in the image, see if anything can grab it.- - This e-mail address is not found in the html source, instead it is located in the css file. I placed the address as a content property of a new element I called e-mail. This seems like the easiest way to get an e-mail address into a page without it showing up in the source. However, it will be trivial for the a bot to read a css file for address as well.
- @ - This is almost the same as the above version, but much more clever. The entire e-mail isn't located next to eachother. The actual html code is <email2 address="alexander">@</email2>. The css tells it to place the content of the address tag before what is contained in email2, and then andamp.org after what is contained within email2, thus creating the address. There are obviously tons of different way to do this. Another good idea may be to just type the first part of your e-mail address followed by a <domain> tag, then have the domain tags content (from the style sheet) be the @ symbol and the domain. One problem with these last two is that they don't always format correctly, and IE doesn't support them (not even 7).
Quick Compatibility Chart
| version | Internet Explorer | Opera 9.1 | Firefox 2 |
| 1 | x | x | x |
| 2 | x | x | x |
| 3 | x | x | x |
| 4 | x | x | x |
| 5 | | x | x |
| 6 | | x | x |
Here is a link to quickly view the css file I used.
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