Hot answers tagged spam
42
I pass all contact forms through a throwaway Gmail account, that forwards mail to the real email address. It's free, it's easy, and Gmail's spam detection is top notch.
It requires no extra effort when making the website, and if anything gets through you just login to the Gmail account and flag it as spam.
You can then set the Gmail inbox to either ...
31
How do they find the 'new user
registration' page? (I'm especially
surprised because some forums don't
have a dedicated URL for this eg,
www.forum.com/register.html , but
instead use query strings or even
other methods invisible to the URL
bar)
They find new sites by:
Crawling and looking for signatures of known software. Usually this is ...
21
Hotmail/Live is ... quirky. Much, much quirkier than other email services when it comes to "protecting" users from bulk email. You can find many complaints about Hotmail/Live all over the web about this stuff -- and it's true in my experience.
First, make sure you sign up using their SenderID forms.
The Sender ID SPF Record Submission Form will put your ...
19
My non-answer is to not do this. Modern email systems, such as GMail and the Barracuda anti-spam appliance, do an excellent job of filtering spam. Any barrier that you put between you and your visitors means a lower level of engagement and, depending on the type of site, potential loss of sales.
If you are worried about users who don't have native mail ...
18
IMHO sending emails to people who subscribed to a different startup is not okay. You could perhaps send a single "please opt in to our new venture" email to all those addresses, but not more than that.
You almost certainly want to look at mailing list handling services. Some examples (in random off the top of my head order):
MailChimp
Campaign Monitor
...
18
Use natural language to spell out the eMail address...
Ex:
thatguy at gmail dot com
You'd be surprised how much harder it is to write a bot that can differentiate natural language vs writing a bot that just searches for the @ sign and regexes a normal address.
It isn't 100% foolproof but it isn't any worse than obfuscation and it won't alienate your ...
16
I've been in the email delivery software industry for years, and I can tell you that there is is no magic bullet for email deliverability.
First, you have to send email that people want to receive. This means email that people click, open, and use the email and that you get a low number of spam complaints. Confirmed opt-in is a great policy, and will gain ...
14
Don't use a fake address, that's reeks of spam
Set up DomainKeys for your domain
Set up SPF for your domain
Put an unsubscribe link in your email
12
Personally, I don't display email addresses on sites, but instead have an easy to use, accessible contact us form, along with an indication of who the email is from; allowing users to send the site owners and operators emails, without exposing email addresses or having to jump through various JavaScript hoops, etc.
This is often the best way to go if your ...
12
From, "How do I know if I’m on a SPAM Blacklist?"
MXToolbox is free. Enter the email service IP addresses and mxtoolbox checks about 100 blacklists.
DNSStuff is an inexpensive (almost free) service where you can check 97 blacklists. Includes other DNS and network tools too.
(Domain Name System Blacklist). Free service. Checks about 80 blacklists.
Update
...
10
Funny this should come up, I was dealing with a similar problem at work today! @HeatherWalters has covered most of the good stuff, but there are a couple of things to add.
You can block referers by domain using the following htaccess code:-
RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} spammer-one\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond ...
9
How do forum spambots work?
Talented (if evil) programmers write them - there are probably as many different types of spambots as there are people writing them but, unfortunately, it only takes a few spambot authors sharing and selling their work to ruin life for administrators...
One popular forum spamming application is called "xrumer" - here's a ...
8
Generally you'll want to avoid being detected as SPAM through using the right content and DNS records.
Sending 10 or more similar emails to a domain in a 30 minute window has also caused us some issues in the past (do not know the cause and it only affects a few domains). So we tend to make batches (in a scripting language such as PHP) then send through a ...
8
What I do is write out the email address as words, wrapped in a span tag: <span class="email">joe dot blow at gmail dot com</span>. Then a page-level script runs, grabbing any such spans and replacing each with a constructed email link. It may not be too obscure, but I've had no complaints. Plus if JavaScript is disabled, the user can still read ...
8
use css to hide some noise from the real text (just all in one line, i formatted it to better illustrate the technique):
u<span class="spam">noise</span>ser
@<span class="spam">noise</span>
example<span class="spam">noise</span>
.com
and then use this little css-snippet:
.spam { display: none; }
if you need valid ...
8
The best solution: use a spam filter.
I actually use Gmail to handle my POP3 email account for my business, because it's much easier to check email on different computers. Gmail's spam filters are the best in the world.
So you can just display webmaster@example.com as your email address and forget about spam.
8
I'm not a lawyer. This answer should not be considered a substitute for legal advice.
Google has updated their algorithms so that spam links hurt their site instead of helping it. Now their site has probably lost a lot of it's former ranking, so their trying to remove those links to get their ranking back up.
I don't think you should worry about getting a ...
7
I would imagine you could do this legitimately by connecting to each addresses SMTP server and starting an SMTP session, going as far as giving the address the message was for but resetting and quitting the session before sending an data. assuming the responses until that point had been 250 OK you could assume the address was valid.
the wikipedia SMTP page ...
7
One alternative to CAPTCHA and less intrusive with better UX is the honeypot method. It's rather simple: you create an input field in the HTML that you hide with javascript. You then check on the server side whether it was filled in or not, if left empty the visitor is human, if filled in a bot.
The reason it works is because javascript is still too ...
7
Looking at bots vs. browsers, they display every user agent that's ever visited their page. Some clever spammer realised that this would be a clever way to drive traffic to their sites, because webmasters/anyone looking at the site is probably going to wonder why there's a url in the user agent, think it's a new specification or something, and visit the url ...
6
My friend and colleague has an excellent article on sending mail here:
http://mikehillyer.com/email/how-to-send-one-billion-email-marketing-messages-per-month/
While you're not working at that scale of things, the meat and potatoes are the same.
6
CAPTCHAs are not bot-proof. There are bot algorithms out there that are perfectly capable of breaking CAPTCHAs, and they're getting better and more widespread with each passing day (while CAPTCHAs have basically reached their maximum opacity). Though in my experience CAPTCHAs can still keep 98% of bots out, so it's unfortunate that your site has been ...
6
I used Google to find this (emphasis mine):
If you've found a site violating the AdSense program policies, please
let us know. The information you provide will be forwarded to a
specialist for further review.
Some issues require specific information for an investigation to be
completed. Those issues include:
Copyrighted content: ...
6
Some companies will employ real life people to fill in captchas and forms etc to do this spamming.
The short answer that you need to use heuristics in your back-end to capture the spam after it's been submitted. High number of URL's, words like medical, viagra, get a bigger c***, long sentences, etc etc.
Further proof of this: Virtual sweatshops defeat ...
6
It's probably just backscatter from spammers using your domain in their bogus sender addresses. Perhaps some spammer just happened to add your domain to a list of bogus sender domains to use.
There's not much that can be done about such messages, except to filter them out. I would recommend adding an SPF record for your domain, but it looks like you ...
5
I use a simple Python script to convert the e-mail address into an mailto link where the e-mail address is HTML entity encoded. This is completely transparent to the user, but seems to obscure the contents enough to defeat most simpleminded harvesting bots.
#! /usr/bin/env python3.0
def entity_encode(text):
out = ""
ba = text.encode()
for i in ...
5
A quite good, while not perfect way is to create the e-mail address via javascript. Most spiders looking for e-mails do not execute javascript, and hence do not find a readable e-mail address.
Here is just one example how it could be done.
5
Use a graphic library (such as GD which is supported by PHP, or similar) to dynamically create .png images containing the email addresses.
Compared to my other answer this solution is less annoying for the users (but not transparent; they can't copy & paste it but must re-type it from scratch) but is also less secure: a computer can potentially read the ...
5
Have you considered the possibility that they are visiting your site, hoping you will research who they are, by following the link (so that you end up visiting their spammy sites.........the blackest of blackhat SEO)? Have you accessed this information on website hits purely through GA or have you looked at your website's traffic logs? Maybe they aren't ...
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