PROTECTING E-MAIL ADDRESSES FROM ROBOTS

Data-mining, i.e. stealing personal information for gain or malice is big business these days. At the very least, if your e-mail address is mined or "harvested" by something or somebody, you'll start getting lots of the dreaded Spam, as Henry Needham pointed out to us just this week.

SENDING TO MORE THAN ONE PERSON

An e-mail in transit can often be intercepted somewhere. If the header contains many addresses, they can all be harvested. someone can then take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel (tr. 3p)! How do you stop it?

Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the TO: or CC: fields for adding the extra e-mail addresses.

Instead, always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) option for listing the second and following e-mail addresses. This is how people you send to can only see their own e-mail address.

FORWARDING E-MAIL

Even more caution applies to forwarding mail which came to you with a big circulation list in it. Many people leave that list in when they forward, say, a joke to all their friends - and so it goes on. This time, all those addresses are in the message's body itself which is much easier to plunder than the header.

When you forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the addresses that appear in the body of the message. That's right, DELETE them. (You must click on "Forward" first, after which you will have full editing capabilities, both in the body and in the header of the message). Highlight all of the addresses in the body of the message and delete them, backspace them, cut them, or whatever it is you know how to do.

ADVANCED PROTECTION

Any page including these, our own Blog pages, posted on-line can be trawled by "robots" looking for stuff. If it's the GoogleBot, that's OK because your page will show up eventually in their search results. If it's a baddie robot looking for e-mail addresses to sell to spammers, that ain't so good. If you're putting an e-mail address on a page, the easiest but possibly the least reliable way is to not show the "@" or the dot, replacing them with something else. For example, bloggs@anywhere.com could become bloggs(at)anywhere[dot]com. However, I'm sure there are some smart robots that are not fooled by this simple technique. Maybe "bloggs at anywhere dot cee-oh-em" is better? (Looks more like a sentence).

A much better method is to emulate those "captcha" images, like where you are told to type in the letters that you see, in order to post a comment somewhere. To use this method, you need to type your e-mail address into a photo editor of some kind and then edit the image so that it is distorted, colored, but still readable. Here's mine: . Then you put it in with your text by inserting your address image in-line with the rest of your text, as I have just done here.

You can also use JavaScript if you're a true web geek. The principle is to assign parts of your e-mail address to variables and then use a script to display (document.write) your address. Currently, this method is invisible to robots. Even better if you make the script a function and store it in a separate file. You would then 'include' the file in your page header and call the function from your page content. (Well, I tried to show you my JavaScript code for this, but Google's Blog Editor is ignoring my use of the "code" element - so if anyone wants to know, e-mail me at the above address).

Myself, I prefer to use the image method described above because it can be used wherever it's possible to insert an image - which is just about everywhere, these days.