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shelfimage
Advanced Member

USA
Joined: Mar 24, 2005
Post Count: 3000
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Protect one a day to keep the doctor away...

A value added service - email protection for your customer
The online version of this article is available at, http://www.maine-webworks.com/tutorials/protectemail

Go to any ten websites and at least eight of them have unprotected email addresses. Sitting ducks to spambots which will instantly harvest it, store it and trigger an unsolicted commercial email message to its owner (uce) as the spambot moves on to its next victim. A web designer should take necessary steps to protect their client as standard practice.

I worked for a competitive telephone company providing business customers an alternative to the Bell voice products, including Internet access. I remember, a new customer reporting ongoing issues with their T1 line and their back up 2.3 Megabyte SDSL connection to the Internet. They were not getting enough bandwidth and felt it was "clogged." At this same time, our backbone providers to the Internet (UUNet & Sprint) were begining to alert us with warnings of several reported mail abuses traceable to our network.

We conducted several on and off-site tests to help our customer. Then, one late evening while we happened to be in the office, we were visited by the customers. They were heated about their connection and spoke about an unmentionable loss of profits. We were scratching our heads because everything checked out, however, our technicians were always dispatched to test during the day. Our Senior Engineer was present this evening and insisted on an immediate visit.

One of their staff members was showing our engineer configurations on a server (they had several mail, firewall & http servers), while he spoke candidly about how he can collect email addresses to "advertise" their products. This customer then deployed a program after loading an IP address range and collected several hundred thousand addresses with little effort.

How?
By harvesting all the innocent "mailto" links it could from each web site it assulted.

Meanwhile warnings from our backbone providers were increasing and our relationships were in jeopardy because of the number of complaints received. We tracked the violations to our neighborhood "spammers." Steps were taken to terminate their service as soon as possible.

The moral of the story is to, "protect your customer's email addresses." And, why not? This can be your value added service. A great benefit to your client. Maybe the upsell you need to make your margins. Who hasn't received spam or heard of spam? Who wants to get spammed? It can be your own personal fight against the, "spammers."

Your customers have the right to know the options. It's our responsiblity to present the options.

"Well, wait a minute," you might blurt. I like my "V!@G RA W 4 CHE@P " email messages and I hope to grow something bigger some day. What's the big deal with spam anyway? Is it that bad?

I'll provide some statistics from wikipedia.org. You can visit their full text of Miscellaneous facts about spam email to learn more. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free.

In May 2004, a report claimed that more than 80% of all emails in the United States classed as spam.
Larger ISPs such as America Online report that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of their email server capacity is consumed by spam. Because this cost is imposed without the consent of either the site owners or the authorized users, many argue that email spamming is a form of theft of services.
Blind users particularly suffer from e-mail spam, because one of the most effective manual techniques for dealing with spam, scanning the list of message subjects to find genuine messages, poses complications for users of screen readers.
According to an article by James Gleick in The Observer, 2 March 2003 (these figures aren't reliable, they are intended merely to illustrate the impact of spam):
- 10 billion spam emails are sent every day;
- 30 billion are expected by 2005;
- 150 spammers send 90% of all email;
- A new email account set up to experiment received spam within 540 seconds;
- 37% of US email is spam; 8% of UK emails;
- EU businesses spend ?10 billion euros each year to deal with spam.
- The U.S. Federal Trade Commission estimates that as much as 2/3 of all spam email contains fraudulent offers, forged headers, or other false claims suggestive of criminal activity.

Spam sucks the bandwith from your ISP. Don't like your DSL or Cable Broadband speed and price? Don't complain to them, complain to a spammer. One example is the "Spam-King" who had sent more than 38 million emails in a year. Read the latest news on him.

A study by the Center for Democracy & Technology in March 2003 titled, Why Am I Getting All This Spam? Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report, found that e-mail addresses posted on Web sites or in newsgroups attract the most spam. There was no distinction found if it was a personal page, business page or a non-profit page.

A spambot simply doesn't care who you are.

How does a spambot work? It looks for email links within an html document. Simple. It will bypass everything else, including text, images, your robots.txt file, meta tags (unless you, Mr. or Mrs. Designer put your email address there as Author), and will follow your internal links hoping to find more mail to links.

Some spambots may not index addresses with .edu and .gov domains. And some people say they're dumb bots...

Ok, I'm convinced now. How does a web designer stop them?

A web designer simply stops using the "MailTo" link as you know it. A typical email address link is written like this:

<a href="mailto:mymail@mydomain.com">E-Mail</a>

The spambot looks for the mailto: and the @ symbol in anchor tags.

Next is a table of methods to help hide an email address from spambots instead of using the traditional <mailto:mymail@mydomain.com> anchor.

Please follow the next link to continue with the article. The table of alternative methods is located at
http://www.maine-webworks.com/tutorials/protectemail

Next Page ->

Credits:
Written by John D. Beatrice of MaineWebworks �2005 http://mainewebworks.com
Originally prepared and posted for Killersites.com forums.
Contact Information: http://mainewebworks.com/contact.php
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"The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings." -Okakura Kakuzo
Save the developers<!>
Maine Webworks
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[Edit 3 times, last edit by shelfimage at Aug 23, 2005 11:52:56 PM]

[Aug 23, 2005 5:58:35 PM]

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admin
Advanced Member

Joined: Jun 14, 2003
Post Count: 2940
Status: Offline


Re: Protect one a day to keep the doctor away...

Hey,

Don't forget the Spam Blocker:

The SPAM BLOCKER COALITION is a new grass roots anti spam effort created to fight against the deluge of spam email that is clogging the Internet and our email boxes. Become a spam-blocker today!

Spam blocker

-

Check out an older article I wrote with some tips and tools to help protect against spam .
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Stefan Mischook

Video Tutorial Store | Web Templates
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[Edit 2 times, last edit by admin at Aug 23, 2005 10:38:00 PM]

[Aug 23, 2005 10:37:24 PM]

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shelfimage
Advanced Member

USA
Joined: Mar 24, 2005
Post Count: 3000
Status: Offline


Re: Protect one a day to keep the doctor away...

@Stef,
I meant to Spam Blocker Coalition to my Additional Resources section. Thanks for the reminder. smile

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"The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings." -Okakura Kakuzo
Save the developers<!>
Maine Webworks
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by shelfimage at Aug 23, 2005 11:54:55 PM]

[Aug 23, 2005 11:51:43 PM]

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tpattison
Advanced Member

UK
Joined: Dec 29, 2004
Post Count: 1662
Status: Offline


Re: Protect one a day to keep the doctor away...

Fantastic post! applause

I've started putting email forms on my sites, but need to check if the email address is being scrambled within the php code. rolling eyes

You see, it's good to be reminded of these problems now and then.

Thanks!

Tim
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Pavonis Mons | Listen of the week: "Residue of Desire" by Acumen

[Aug 24, 2005 8:16:22 AM]

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davidd
Stranger

Joined: Feb 1, 2006
Post Count: 1
Status: Offline


Re: Protect one a day to keep the doctor away...

Here's a really handy quick online tool / script that "encodes" an email address from within your website pages. It uses html/javascript and simple styles to appear and function the same as an href!

http://www.blacksheepcreative.co.nz/support/index.php?show_subject=25

David.
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[Edit 3 times, last edit by davidd at Feb 1, 2006 1:06:50 PM]

[Feb 1, 2006 4:31:54 AM]

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