OT - about DCML messages online

[Morten Lied Johansen]

On Tue, 13 May 2003, Donald D. Markstein wrote:

> > On my own homepage I
> > don't write out the @-sign (I make it "at" instead or _at_ or somethng
> > similar, and in the link I add a REMOVE_THIS after the address.
>
> Theresa, how does that "REMOVE_THIS" code work? Does it tell the robots not
> to harvest that address, or simply obfuscate the address they do harvest? If
> the latter, how does the link still work? I can certainly see how altering
> the address that appears on the screen works without interfering with the
> operation, but would very much like to know how to keep them from getting
> the address inside the tag.

It works by relying on human intelligence. Any human who tries to send a
mail to that link will instantly realise that they should indeed
REMOVE_THIS, while the automated tools the spammers use might not.
Although... lately they have been including this kind of logic in the
harvesters, so you might want to look into other ways of invalidating
your email that isn't so common. (I've seen someone use
"remove_underpants" :)

Another important point is that when you obfuscate like this, you should
never use a valid domain. If some unfortunate person had bought the
REMOVE_THIS.com domain, he would get a fair amount of mail sent to him
that he neither deserves nor wants. Usually people are encouraged to
obfuscate their address and add .invalid on the end. That marks it as an
invalid address to any email software that should choose to look for it
(opening the possibility of the email software alerting the user that
they need to check the address) and also makes sure spammers don't spam
some unsuspecting domain.

-- 
Morten
Left To Themselves, Things Tend To Go From Bad To Worse. -- Murphys Law
§5