Web site security

Publishing an email address on a web page invites more spam. Protect your address by masking it from the email harvesters (spambots) used by spammers. This article tests 50 masking methods against 23 harvesters to see which methods work to stop spammers, and which do not.

Legitimate web site visitors are there to read your content, but spammers only visit to run email harvesters (spambots) that scan your web pages for email addresses. To protect your addresses, and avoid wasting network bandwidth talking to spammers, change your web server configuration to block spammer access. Blacklist spammer IP addresses, block access from known harvester spiders, or require visitors to log in. Some of the methods tested in this article were successful at blocking email harvesters.

A spammer’s email harvester is a web spider that crawls through the pages of your site looking for email addresses. To protect your addresses, hide the pages that contain them. Use a robots.txt file or <meta> tags to stop well-behaved harvesters (are there any?), and hidden links, redirects, forms, and frames to try to stop the rest. The email harvesters tested in this article were stopped by some of these tricks, but not by others.