What do email harvesters look for on a website?

Factual Questions
1

On my website I have a mailto: link (Customerservice@mydomain.com), and I get flooded with email everyday. Well, it’s not that bad, but that’s besides the point. If I have my webmaster change my email address to something else and make it not a link will that keep the spambots under control or are they just looking for the @ symbol, or something setup like name@mydomain.com.

What I was going to do is have him just put a new address on and break the link ie name @ mydomain . com or something to that extent, but alot of people that use that address (the legit ones) are emailing me becuase they are having issues navigating the site and I can tell from expierence that they arn’t ready to put an email address back together, but hopefully they can cut and paste or just type the address into their email client.

2

Use JavaScript to disguise your email. Also I have my own domain and spammer routinely guess at things like

help@mydomain.com

accounting@mydomain.com

webmaster@mydomain.com

So don’t use them. If you have customer service use something different like CustServ@mydomain.com

So it makes it harder to guess

The best thing to do is use a form that uses perl or PHP to send the form. But JavaScript alone will eliminate 90% of the harvesting

Here’s a site that has free javascripts

Click Here For Free JavaScripts

3

Agreed.

However, I would caution that spammers are able to use these scripts to send out their own emails, which opens up an even bigger can of worms.

In the long run, I think the best way to deal with the spam issue is to filter it at your end.

4

You can configure your web form script engine to prevent this.