easy email protection

fifeclub posted this at 21:26 — 5th September 2003.

Joined: Feb 2001

I've got this mySQL database full of hundreds of email addresses. I'm not worried about attacks on my database, nor am I capable of protecting it against sophisticated hackers anyway. But I am concerned about spiders indexing my site page by page and farming (right term?) all of these emails and using it to send these people spam. Just as an example, you can see how I currently display emails.

I know I can just not print out the email but as I understand, that wouldn't matter because spam spiders just look at the link code anyway. What do you suggest as an EASY way to help protect these email addresses not get farmed by a autoindexing spider? I don't want to require users to need a password and I understand that simple stuff isn't great protection, but just something to make it a little harder for a machine to steal.

Any ideas? Thanks.

:batman:

Suzanne posted this at 21:36 — 5th September 2003.

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

MUNGE it.

Search google for some simple ones, or adapt something like Hiveware's Enkoder for the task.

fifeclub posted this at 02:24 — 6th September 2003.

He has: 688 posts

Joined: Feb 2001

Here's a cool sounding link if it works, but it won't work for my situation because the address would need to be split in two halves.

I guess a big question is "How do spammers get the email addresses?" Do they get it from the source code or would their machines be able to read an address that is somehow compiled on the user side? What if you write down the address but there isn't a clickable link? And can their machines find and take email addresses that are linked via a button?

Suzanne posted this at 02:48 — 6th September 2003.

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

careful, you don't want to go so far that you ruin the ability of the users to actually use the email addresses, eh? It'd be better to lock them behind member-only access.