Protect one a day... keep the doctor away.
A value added service - email protection for your customer.


Go to any ten websites and at least eight of them have unprotected email addresses. Sitting ducks to spambots which will instantly harvest it, store it and trigger an unsolicted commercial email message to its owner (uce) as the spambot moves on to its next victim. A web designer should take the necessary steps to protect their client as standard practice.

I worked for a competitive telephone company providing business customers an alternative to the Bell voice products, including Internet access. I remember, a new customer reporting ongoing issues with their T1 line and their back up 2.3 Megabyte SDSL connection to the Internet. They were not getting enough bandwidth and felt it was "clogged." At this same time, our backbone providers to the Internet (UUNet & Sprint) were begining to alert us with warnings of several reported mail abuses traceable to our network.

We conducted several on and off-site tests to help our customer. Then, one late evening while we happened to be in the office, we were visited by the customers. They were heated about their connection and spoke about an unmentionable loss of profits. We were scratching our heads because everything checked out, however, our technicians were always dispatched to test during the day. Our Senior Engineer was present this evening and insisted on an immediate visit.

One of their staff members was showing our engineer configurations on a server (they had several mail, firewall & http servers), while he spoke candidly about how he can collect email addresses to "advertise" their products. This customer then deployed a program after loading an IP address range and collected several hundred thousand addresses with little effort.

How? By harvesting all the "mailto" links it could from each web site it scanned.

Meanwhile warnings from our backbone providers were increasing and our relationships were in jeopardy because of the number of complaints received. We tracked the violations to our neighborhood "spammers." Steps were taken to terminate their service as soon as possible.

The moral of the story is to, "protect your customer's email addresses." And, why not? This can be your value added service. A great benefit to your client. Maybe the upsell you need to make your margins. Who hasn't received spam or heard of spam? Who wants to get spammed? It can be your own personal fight against the, "spammers." Your customers have the right to know the options. It's our responsiblity to present the options.

"Well, wait a minute," you might blurt. I like my "V!@G RA W 4 CHE@P" email messages and hope I do grow something bigger some day. What's the big deal with spam anyway? Is it that bad?

I'll provide some statistics from wikipedia.org. You can visit their full text of Miscellaneous facts about spam email to learn more. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free.

  1. In May 2004, a report claimed that more than 80% of all emails in the United States classed as spam.
  2. Larger ISPs such as America Online report that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of their email server capacity is consumed by spam. Because this cost is imposed without the consent of either the site owners or the authorized users, many argue that email spamming is a form of theft of services.
  3. Blind users particularly suffer from e-mail spam, because one of the most effective manual techniques for dealing with spam, scanning the list of message subjects to find genuine messages, poses complications for users of screen readers.
  4. According to an article by James Gleick in The Observer, 2 March 2003 (these figures aren't reliable, they are intended merely to illustrate the impact of spam):

Spam sucks the bandwith from your ISP. Don't like your DSL or Cable Broadband speed and price? Don't complain to them, complain to a spammer. One example is the "Spam-King" who had sent more than 38 million emails in a year. Read the latest news on him.

A study by the Center for Democracy & Technology in March 2003 titled, Why Am I Getting All This Spam? Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report, found that e-mail addresses posted on Web sites or in newsgroups attract the most spam. There was no distinction found if it was a personal page, business page or a non-profit page

A spambot simply doesn't care who you are.

How does a spambot work? It looks for email links within an html document. Simple. It will bypass everything else, including text, images, your robots.txt file, meta tags (unless you, Mr. or Mrs. Designer put your email address there as Author), and will follow your internal links hoping to find more mail to links. Some spambots may not index addresses with .edu and .gov domains. And some people say they're dumb.

 How does a web designer stop them?

A web designer simply stops using the "MailTo" link in its default state. A typical email address link is written like this:

<a href="mailto:mymail@mydomain.com"> E-Mail</a>

The spambot looks for the mailto: and the @ symbol in anchor tags.

Following is a table of alternative methods of using the the traditional <mailto:mymail@mydomain.com> anchor to hide an email address from email address harvesters (spambots).

Please follow the next link to continue with the article. The table of alternative methods is located at


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Credits:

Written by John D. Beatrice of MaineWebworks ©2005 http://mainewebworks.com
Originally prepared and posted for Killersites.com forums.    View the Post.

Contact Information: http://mainewebworks.com/contact.php