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[ << HOME ] As mentioned in my article,
Mean
Dean's Anti-spam
Obfuscator, this program will randomly convert your entries into a combination of
numeric and hexadecimal encodings, as well as a salting of some non-converted characters
that will
either
hide your e-mail address from spambots and/or cause their mailers to gag because they're not
expecting all three encoding in radom. This program also obfuscates the
prompts to give spambots less key words to search, find and filche.
The only
mandatory
field is the email address. If you leave off both prompts, then the system only returns the
mangled e-mail address. If you enter a hyperlink prompt, but not a mouseover prompt - yup,
you got it, it mangles the prompts as well. After you've made your entries and
hit the 'create code' button, the system will return to you a cut-n-paste solution for your
spambot problem.
* UPDATE #2 (October 29, 2003) *
What a difference a year makes, huh? One year later, I've tweaked the obfuscator just a bit more. Now you'll notice you have the option of
having your email address rendered as inline javascript. Yes, this makes the address unreadable to
non-javascript enabled browsers, which is about 13% of the browsing population if I recall. For
that reason the dfault option is set to 'no' ... do not render as javascript. I've also done one
other thing, based on several requests, and that is packaged the obfuscation code into a
Perl module for personal and non-commercial use: Obfuscator.pm.
* UPDATE (October 29, 2002) *
In response to Mark Pilgrim's
'cut through obfuscation like butter' remark,
I've modified the underlying program to allow you to futher collude your
email address by entering addresses such as foo+antispam+@foobar.com and/or foo-at-foobar-dot-com
(foo@bar.com), and/or to add other
anti-spam features such as foo<REMOVEME>@bar.com and/or some combination of the above.
The first example is based upon an article by Anders Jacobsen entitled
"Email
addresses with a "+" are VALID." The later two are examples will mean your users will have to manually
unmangle your address. A necessary
anti-usability evil for those of you without domains and the ability to use and create a catch-all email address
to handle the "+" scenario than can past muster against some of the
more thorough deobfuscators.
Please keep in mind that no solution, other than total abstinence will keep your e-mail address safe. Also, please be mindful of my terms of service. And while I am logging all activity (38.103.63.16), I am NOT
collecting email addresses.
If you run into any problems, or have a question, please drop me a line. |
