I'm getting a lot of spam from my website and lost one prospective client that I know of. How do I prevent this?
Is there a string of code for my "mailto" link for one of those alpha-numerical fill-in boxes in order for real humans to reach me?
Is there a way I can specify "Roman alphabet" and at least get rid of the non Roman character emails?

Besides the address itself, how do spammers get my email?


Life is Networking

HI

this is a real problem with lots of sites, it seems that there are email harvester robots, rather like the search engines robots that go around picking up email addresses off pages.

There are many things you can do to make life difficult for them - if you want to keep the mailto link then you can use javascript to "hide" the @ sign in the email address.
One thing I have done with great success is to put three or four radio buttons on the page with a silly question like What animal makes a moo sound, then different options for the buttons.

If you want to be more secure you can hide the address altogether by presenting a form that the user fills in, then send the form details plus an identifier back to the server where you pick up the email address details from a database, then move all the inputs into an email and send it.

Another is to use a captcha test - you have probably seen them, a small image that contains letters or numbers, the user has to put them into a textbox to prove that they are human - very effective.

Another strategy is to filter the messages as they come in - I use popfile for that, it learns as you tell it which messages are spam etc, mine is better than 99% accurate now and saves me hours. I also have my hosting set up so that only messages to actual email addresses get forwarded to me, all the rest go into a black hole, that way the spammer does not know whether the address is real or not.

I did find something here: www.manastungare.com/projects/prevent-spam/

A string of code to obfuscate the email address. What do you think? I found this developer in the Studio MX Bible.

Life is Networking

That works fine.

It is always going to be a battle between the spammers and "us" who want to keep our pages clean and letting people send direct from web pages. I've taken to putting forms on my pages so that my address is no longer exposed at all, it's a bit different for the users but it stops the spam because I also have an random image that the user has to identify correctly before the email gets sent.

I use this function: ( I usually include it for reuse)
<?php
function protectMail($a){
$result= ' ';
$a = 'mailto:' . $a;
for($i =0; $i < strlen($a); $i++){
$result .= '&#' . ord(substr($a, $i, 1)) . ';';
}
return $result;
}
?>
and on the page where the email address is published:
<?php echo '<a href=" ' . protectMail('me@my emailaddress.co.uk') . '">some clickable text.</a>'; ?>

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