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I figure that the simplest way to put my email address on my new site is to just insert an image of my business card, which is a nicely designed card as well. My contacts are all on the card. Could any kind of spambot pick up the email address from an image??
Thanks very much.
OCR cannot read a graphics image stored in memory. OCR can only read something once it is printed. Thats where the Optical bit comes in!
optical adj. 1 of sight; visual. 2 of or according to optics. 3 aiding sight. optically adv.
All a Spamm bot will see is a bunch of miscellaneous data that it wont be able to resolve into readable characters.
What a spam bot might do is recognise it as an graphics file and download it on the of chance that it might contain an Email address but it would take human intervention to confirm it. Not impossible but very unlikely.
Stuart
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Thanks for those replies.
I was able to cut, paste, and insert a little javascript, which will apparently make the thing unspammable. Well.... I previewed it in my browser, and it looks like an other hypertext email address; and in the browser's 'page source,' the javascript was of course visible. So, is that unspammable? Can the bots read neither the javascript hypertext link [which is loud and clear to the human eye], nor the address in the javascript in 'page source' [which of course uses no @ symbol] ???
Thanks again.
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Spam bots will be able to read the Java scrip, including the address of the page source. But if it does all it will get is a graphics file.
The data in a graphics file is meaningless until it is rendered by either a printer or a graphics processor. You need to look inside a graphics file and think how a spam bot could make any sense of that.
Stuart
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I'll have to disagree with StuartS. There are OCR readers out there that spammers use which can decypher the text on a web page. That is the reason the captcha images used have become more and more complex.
Typically these are used to create accounts on sites built upon a common framework (such as PHPNuke) so they can then spam the forum.
I guess it would be possible to use this functionality to scan sites looking for email addresses, but I think the threat is low.
A JavaScript solution will work fine IF the email is properly obfruscated in the code. Something like this:
<html>
<head><script type="text/JavaScript">
function spamProof(uname, site, tld)
{
email = '';
email += uname + '@' + site + '.' + tld + '';
document.write(email);
}
</script></head>
<body>
My email address is:
<script type="text/JavaScript">spamProof('me', 'here', 'com');</script></body>
</html>Michael J
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In that case the Spam bot downloads the image and renders it, something that could be done, but hardly worthwhile in the majority of cases.Downloading and rendering a Captchar image is worthwhile because the Spam bot knows it is going to find something useful in it.
Downloading end rendering every image it finds on a web page is not going to be worthwhile as the vast majority of them will not contain any useful information.
Stuart
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Thanks for all those.
I found this little cut & paste javascript mailto:
<script language="JavaScript"><!--
var name = "MyName";
var domain = "MyDomain.com";
document.write('');
document.write(name + '@' + domain + '');
// --></script>However, I notice that it has an @ symbol, which would be visible in Page Source. Maybe the bots look for those.... ?
Anyway - you should bear in mind that this is like nuclear physics or jazz theory to me - I am now onto a fill-in form with recaptcha, although I am not finished yet. I still have to tell the form what to do with the data and plug in the recaptcha thing. I am doing this with DIY software.
So even the recaptcha method is crackable?
Yikes! I should have people submit DNA samples before they get my email address.
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