Email address, JavaScript, the noscript tag, spam

[nancylebov]

Thanks for the advice. You guys have convinced me that I need to accommodate non-JavaScript browsing. It doesn't matter how few browsers can't use JavaScript if a good many geeky people (a large part of my customer base) turn off their JavaScript.

I've beaten the noscript tag problem into submission. It turns out that the JavaScript has to be on for me to update the html on my cafepress page, but off if I want to see whether my noscript is working.

On the other hand, I don't know whether I've protected myself from any spammers at all. Is it only the gungho spammers who go after the source code, with the casual slobs contenting themselves with the visible pages? I bet there's no way to obfuscate the email address in a mailto tag, but I'd be delighted if I'm wrong.

The reason I'm using my gmail address is that I'm hoping gmail spam blocking is at least fairly good.

Comments

[avram]

I've been using gMail for four or five years. In the past month (exactly -- I just looked in my spam folder, and the oldest message is dated Jan 20) I've received almost 5000 spam messages. That averages out to about 166/day. Of those 166 I get in a typical day, somewhere between two and ten show up in my inbox.

[landley.livejournal.com]

The gung-ho types are the people who collect addresses to sell to _other_ spammmers. Any automation they can do that fetches 1000 more address through the internet, they'll do. Meaning any address obfuscation strategy is either AI-complete or only works as long as it doesn't become widely adopted.

That said, gmail has the advantage of being able to detect spam by data-mining the incoming email of their enormous userbase for sufficiently similar messages. The definition of spam is that lots of people get it; you have to filter out mailing lists and people forwarding stupid HTML greeting cards to each other, but if nothing else they can use repetition as another weight in their spam filters.