how do you trick the spam? re: email forms

annie: at this point, there's not going to be a lot you can do. Once the spam bots pick it up, it's sold, transferred, and generally passed around like a 7th-grade love note.

There are some steps you can take, however, to first stop the bleeding, then repair some of the damage:

1. if you want to stop bots from picking it up, create a form that sends out email to info@(whatever.com), but conceal the address using server-side programming (a language such as ASP/PHP). Do not use Javascript or a hidden form input, since that is client-side code and as such spam bots can read it and eventually decode and harvest it.
   
   I'm not going to go into detail on exactly how to program a server-side form-to-email, since this really depends on the language selected.
2. Use your host's webmail interface (a good host will provide you with one for checking email) to set up processing rules to filter out the obvious spammers. It will be a lot easier for you to filter out the keywords as opposed to the spam emails themselves, since domain names and email addresses changes, but words such as "Viagra", "XXX", and "Virgin Teens" have a lot less variance (I apologize to anyone I may have offended, but I provided those phrases as illustrative example only.)
3. For every spam you get after you've got the rules put in (and you'll have to update them a few times before you get them quite right), check to see if there's a "remove" hyperlink. If there is, indicate that you wish to be removed.
   
   Back in the day, this usually meant your email address would be sold even more, but thanks to some tougher restrictions (primarily by the US government), spammers have to dump your email address and usually do.
   
   If you're not sure if a spammer will dump your email address, enter in an alternate email address (I usually create email addresses and point them to a Hotmail account I use for this purpose) and see if the spam level increases. If it does, don't bother with the removal.

If you still need to publish an email address directly on a site, which you shouldn't, then the best thing to do is to embed it into an image and not hyperlink the image. Spambots can't read the pixels on those. They just see one big black ugly square.

And if you really want to filter out spam, you can talk to Erik Warmelink and install his anti-spam filter on your server. Erik Warmelink is a rather hermetic young man from Holland who is convinced that 99% of emails that come from North America are unsolicited and therefore are spam. So you likely will never get anything, but at least the spam will all be gone!

Firewall 'em all and let God sort 'em out! That's the Erik way.

I don't know on that, mossoi. Even in countries where spam runs wild and free (North America is a continent, by the way), there are personal emails and things people are expecting. I can't see the number, even in those countries, being any higher than 50-60%.

And in North America, it's got to be lower than that, since both Canada and the US (I'm not sure about Mexico and Central America) have anti-spam legislation. Personally, I would say that about 30-40% of the emails I get are spam in nature. 99%? That's just wrong.

Anyway, look up the name "Erik Warmelink" on Google or something. You will see a very, very bitter and angry young man. Some of what he says is right, but he's just got his head shoved so far up his keester that he can't see the light unless a proctologist does an exam.

The official figure of worldwide spam % used to be 33 %, I think it's gone up to 50 % now.

One way or another, it's not 99% in North America. That would imply that 1 in every 100 emails is actually worth reading. Our boy Erik needs to get himself some Valium and relax.

[searchweb]Erik Warmelink[/searchweb]

Check out some of his forum and message board posts. (For those who are easily offended, don't read the webservertalk.com one. That one almost shocked me a little. That's very hard to do.)