suggestions for a good email address encrypter

[rain_storm]

Ive been reading 'Create your own website' by Michael Gray. When the book is talking about adding a contact href it states that printing your email address is very insecure. He mentions mailtoencryptor as a solution but when I go the mailtoencryptor.com there is no downloads. In fact theres nothing there but a link to the hosts webpage. Now at the moment I have my email address embedded in the html but I would prefer to have it encrypted and just put up a clickable png with the email written on it. Anyone use some software similar to mailtoencryptor?

[Shockwave]

First question..
Have you got php?

Second question (if you have)
Make an image verification program.. I could do that for you

[rain_storm]

No php here I do have the JDK if that can be used. I read that you can encrypt the address with some JavaScript but even the guy who said that also said that you should never publish your email seems thats why mailtoencryptor is offline the spambots have it figured out. Is it enough to have the email there as an image without a href or can spambots still get it

[Shockwave]

Putting it as an image will certainly deter most web bots. Some people just encrypt thier email address by doing something like;

address [-at-] domain [-dot-] co [-dot-] uk

And believe it or not, that will stop a lot of spam.

There are even web bots that puportedly have some success at deciphering verification images, they work by determining (amongst other things) the thickness of lines in an image and attempting to break the image into segments which is why a lot of these security codes have overlapping letters.

If someone is going to dedicate the time to hack your site personally then there's not a lot you can do, but generically yes, you can just add an image and it will get rid of most spam.

If you are taking an interest in web design, you'll want to get some web space with a proper host that lets you use php or even perl, it's addictive though!

The server we are on here is php 5.2 enabled, you could have a subdomain here if you ever outgrow your current place

[rain_storm]

At the moment untergrund suits my needs very well eventually I will need to move elsewhere but not before I learn a lot more about web development. You're right though it is addictive

address [-at-] domain [-dot-] co [-dot-] uk
^cant believe that browsers can parse that
will that work if I use doctype strict?

[zawran]

If its not really a commercial page, you might splice it into a sentence, where the user has to decipher the address, something like this:

" You can email me using the following address:   name has to do with myname and that name is at a location called domainnamegoeshere and its on extension com.

Then the colored bits put together is the email address "myname@domainnamegoeshere.com"

Its not all that clever, and might not be totally userfriendly, but it should be able to prevent bots, at least I think it could.

[Jim]

If you can use javascript, then put the email address in javascript with extra letters in it or in reverse(enough to fool the bots), then make your mailto: link call a javascript function which undoes the 'encryption' to get the email address.

Jim

[rain_storm]

Found out that untergrund allows CGI and PHP scripts, MySQL databases. So looks like I can use PHP but I think I would like to use the javescript meathod. I havent had anything that pushed me to use java yet so I think that this would be a good place to start. The quick fix at the moment is to have an unclickable image. I prefered to have the user do as little work as possible to contact me, I dont want people to change their minds about sending an email if they have to go out of their way after all they arent obliged to do anything. Hopefully this will be ready for the next time I release a demo so I can update at the same time

[Shockwave]

Make a contact form then with image verification and then use a script to process the forum.

If the mailserver is properly configured at untergrund then php's mail() function works really nicely.

[Zeb]

If you've not got PHP on your web space then I'd move to somewhere that does.

I've written a very nice image verification captcha script (very short about 10 lines) that makes use of Windows TrueType fonts (TTF) so you can use any from the WINDOWS\Fonts directory or download something and use that. Makes use of random colors and also supports background images for that extra something.

If you want to see it working check out the contact and guestbook on my website:

http://www.pictureinthesky.net

As for having your email address embedded in your HTML, REMOVE IT NOW!!!

Once your address has got into the hands of the spammers there's absolutely no way of removing it from their lists. If you do need to make it public then make an image showing it.

Writing something like myemailATsomewhereDOTnet no longer works as bots have been educated. There are other methods that bots can get past as well.

If you want my scripts ask and you shall have

[Jim]

I was just thinking

Code: [Select]

<html>
<head>
<title>Mail To Example</title>
<script language="javascript">
function getmail()
{
var bit0='mailto';
var bit1='jimshaw';
var bit2='ii';
var bit3='net';

location.href=bit0+':'+bit1+'@'+bit2+'.'+bit3;
}
</script>
</head>
<body>

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:getmail(); return false;">Mail Me</a>

</body>
</html>

The problem is, it really doesn't matter what you do, you're going to get spam.  Someone else you know will get hacked or cc your address around the planet, or, more likely, the spammer will have a big list of domains (from the already known email addresses) and a big list of user names, and will just put them together, so.

joe@site.net
ian@othersite.com
means it's probably worth the spammer trying
ian@site.net
joe@othersite.com

Jim