Spam Harvesting

Jimbob1989 · Dec 27, 2004

I was wondering if this is in any way applicable to use on forums.

To retrieve valid email addresses, many spammers run website extractor programs to recieve the HTML that makes up a webpage and searches for an email address. So one way to fool website extractor programs is to disguise your email address with ASCII code equivilalents within your html code. Normally, an email address appears as raw HTML code in plain english.

For example, if you wanted to list your email address as myname@isp.com on a webpage, it would look like this in the equivalent HTML code:

<p>Email Adress: <a
href+"mailto:myname@isp.com">myname@isp.com/a></p

With the email address clearly visible in the HTML code, website extractor programs have little trouble retrieving any email addresses. But if you substitute each letter of your email address with the ASCII character equivalent, such as typing &#109 for the letter "m", &#121 for the letter "y" and so on, your email address is now a lot harder to retrieve as the HTML code is now made up of numbers and symbols.

Both versions of the HTML code display the email address myname@ISP.com on a webpage, but the ASCII versioin prevents spamers from retrieving your email address since the spammer programs won't recognize the ASCII code as a valid email address
Click to expand...

Jimbob

Bubba · Dec 27, 2004

Jimbob1989 said:

I was wondering if this is in any way applicable to use on forums.
Click to expand...

For those Forums that allow HTML code....anything that would help in e-mail harvesting is a plus.

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Spam Harvesting

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Spam Harvesting

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