Re: spam-proofing my mhonarc archive

[Mark Stosberg <mark@summersault.com>]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>
> Personally I have replaced all mailto links on web sites with links to
> contact forms. I have also started to use a 'noreply' address (which
> normally is forwarded to /dev/null) when posting to mailing lists and
> Usenet groups where there is a big risk for harvesting by the spam bots.
> Instead I provide a contact form link like the one below. Unfortunately
> this is not (yet) common practice. :)

Here's another simple trick for protecting addesses, "the m script". You can install a
simple script (example below), so that an address like this:

http://host.com/cgi-bin/m/marka@afoo.com

This creates a valid mailto: link for mark@foo.com.
I like this solution because it's "user friendly" in the sense the users
are presented with adddresses they can use directly without further
decoding. It's also easy to update the pattern replacement to be
even harder to guess for the robots.

	Mark

 --
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
   Mark Stosberg            Principal Developer
   mark@summersault.com     Summersault, LLC
   765-939-9301 ext 202     database driven websites
 . . . . . http://www.summersault.com/ . . . . . . . .


 ######
 #!/usr/bin/perl
 use strict;

 # trim off the leading "/"
 my $add = substr($ENV{'PATH_INFO'},1);

 # remove the extra "a"'s
 $add =~ s/a\@a/\@/g;

 print "Location: mailto:$add\n\n";;
 exit(0);

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