avoiding spam on public email address

Hi everyone, just wondering if I could get some advice/ help...

I run the website for my waterpolo club, and within the site are links to people such as captain, vice captain etc. they are set as captain@domain.org and this is then forwarded using zoneedit to the captain for this year.

one of my receivers is getting large amounts of spam, and so I'm looking for a way to minimise this. The email addresses are currently just linked by putting the address in the html as <a href="mailto:captain@domain.org">email the captain</a>

but I understand that spammers can pick these out really easily.

Is there a good, simple way to try and cut down on spammers harvesting the addresses from this site?

any thoughts much appreciated,

cheers,

baz

 

Use an image.

 

That's how Bit does it http://www.bit-tech.net/about/

 

captain {at] thedomain _nospamthanks_ [dot} com
Humans will get it, bots won't.

Or if you can, install somethign like SpamAssassin on the mail server.

 

I use a bit of javascript that assembles the link when a person mouses over the link.

Code:

<script language="JavaScript"><!--
var username = "captian";
var domain = "domain.com";
document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + username + '@' + domain + '\" class="special">');
document.write('E-Mail' + '</a>');
// --></script>

Just set the username and domain and your good to go.

 

You're giving humans a lot more credit than they deserve.

 

I change my statement to "most humans". But it's better than just hoping they have JavaScript enabled.
And as a bonus, it might ween out all the idiots who want to contact you.

 

No they won't - trust me on this one. I used to run a review site and had my mailto links set up like that. About 80% of new correspondence would end up in the catch-all mailbox.

I'd suggest just using Google Apps for your Domain (google.com/a). Same spam filtering quality as gmail, plus the storage and docs/spreadsheets to boot. And free. If you're changing the recipient every year, it should be easy enough to use the "nicknames" option to have the current captain of the team get anything sent to captain@domain.com. Of course, it's not going to address the problem of not getting spam sent to the address in the first place, but it's too late for that already. Best bet is using better filtering, and I've yet to use something for free that works as well as Gmail.

See: http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y66/Firehed/googleappsemail.jpg

 

There is an awesome way to do it.

Look at technique #2
http://www.metaprog.com/samples/encoder.htm

Or the Javascript function: http://www.bronze-age.com/nospam/

 

Seeing as the address (and, I'd assume, whole domain) is already infested, I think that obfuscating the email address, by means of Javascript, image replacement, or otherwise, is going to do very little to help the problem.

 

I would have to agree. change the e-mail domain if possible and then use something like an image.

 

As long as you spend a short period of time with a trainable spam filter (like Thunderbird) then you'll be fine in the long run

 

On W3schools figures, 94% of users have javascript operating, and they're weighted towards tech-savvy users so the real-world figure is even higher. Sod the paranoids.

I use a two-pronged system, a js routine that hides the mailto address on my pages, and email forwarding set to only pass a few address prefixes; everything else gets forwarded to the black hole address provided by my forwarder. If I give other sites my email address it's one with a prefix I can drop if they don't take any precautions and it starts bringing in spam.

So if captain@domain is compromised, ditch it and start fresh with a well-hidden capt@domain or similar.