Monday, February 05, 2007
Plagued by SPAM
One of the problems with having a website for our gite business is SPAM
The vast majority of our business comes via email from the website but along with a few genuine enquirys we get about 500 SPAM emails a day. The makes it really difficult to separate the good, (HAM), from the bad, (SPAM). It's doubly difficult if an important email has a unhelpful or even blank subject line.
Filtering the emails with whitelists and blacklists goes someway to identify SPAM but plently still slip through and there is always the danger that HAM gets marked as SPAM. Our web hosting provider provides SPAM filtering but we still have to download all the email 'just in case'.
In order to get email addresses the spammers usually scan websites with a webbot to harvest the information. There are techniques to 'hide' the email address on a website from a webbot but still allow a human user to view and click the link. Keeping email addresses out of the hands of spammers should help to reduce the volume of junk mail. I've known about some of the techniques for a long time but made a conscious decision not to use them. I was concerned at the time that older browsers might not display email contact information and lose a potential gite customer.
The rise in SPAM and the fact that most people now have a modern browser has changed that.
One technique is to use a contact form. Some people don't like contact forms and it requires that the user enters their email address. A small typo means you get an enquiry but can't call them back. The other technique is to use Javascript to hide the email address from the webbot but still allow a visitor to click to compose and send an email.
To this end I have been changing the website to add a contact form and adding Javascript code obscufate the email addresses. Adding a contact form but retaining an email address should cover all the bases. I Hope.
I bit of searching revealed this, particularly here. However further research indicated that even this technique might not be enough as the spambots are getting smarter all the time. In the end I settled for a technique in this post with some minor modifications to cater for non Javascript enabled browsers. Extra complication but hopefully worth it.
All this work isn't going to stop the SPAM overnight but it is a start to limit the harvesting of the email addresses. Used in conjuction with some configuration at the web host to reject 'ivalid' email addresses I'm hoping that it might reduce things in the long term.
| 9:54:00 AM
Plagued by SPAM
