Topic: Is it dangerous to display your e-mail address as an image?

like here http://martin-fuchs.net/contact.php

i'm finishing my new website and made quite bad experiences with contact forms. since captcha and similar tools are all using distorted letters, I was wondering if images containing an address (without distortion) are a prey for spambots. can spambots read text in images? if yes, do they also scan all images of a website for mail addresses?
I hope you know more about this topic than I do....any advices?


The Space Between Us | My Blog: lukas.grumet.at

It is dangerous in regards to spam to give your email out publicly period. Putting an email address in an image will greatly reduce spam. The more distorted it is the less likely a spam bot can read it.

It's dangerous USING an email address if you don't know that ALL senders and recipients are uninfected by trojans, viri or spyware, and will stay uninfected in the foreseeable future, and public archives etc. are kept with email addresses obfuscated/removed.

It's dangerous putting an email address online where anyone can see the address, period. There's porn site that hijack other sites's captcha mechanisms, letting their users do the decoding for them, and the same method can be used for email addresses in images. There's pretty good software for solving captchas, especially if the construction mechanism used is consistent. The best captchas use distinctly different ways of obfuscating different parts, at random, such as using dithering, distortion, colour differences, contrasts, and lines and other noise. If you just put your email address in an image, but don't protect it in any other way such as those used in these harder captchas, then the only factor that really protects your address from being collected is that you're making it harder detecting that it actually is an email address. I doubt there's many bots out there that tries to detect email addys in images though, as the practice isn't wide spread.

It's also dangerous to have an address that is "guessable" from any public data, such as firstname.lastname@example.org, if there's a name like Firstname Lastname on the contacs or about pages on example.org.


Or you can simply rely on rejecting bad SMTP-connections, using spam filters (bayesian or otherwise) and possibly whitelisting/blacklisting or mandating certain tags in the subject, those can work pretty well. Or not putting the address online at all, only putting a form online that will server side send the mail.

--
var Liorean = {
abode: "http://liorean.web-graphics.com/",
profile: "http://codingforums.com/member.php?u=5798"};

OR ... you can just use gmail and be done with spam ... *yawn* ...

quote:

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liorean said:

I doubt there's many bots out there that tries to detect email addys in images though, as the practice isn't wide spread.

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that's what i wanted to hear


The Space Between Us | My Blog: lukas.grumet.at

I rarely give out my personal email (from my ISP) yet I get a few spams per day.

On the other hand, I posted my website email on my site in full spam bot view (albeit redirected to Yahoo) and it almost never gets any spam. The original link however is full of spam.

Moral of the story: don't know about Gmail but Yahoo does a damn good job of killing spam.
An image of an email addy, together with a Gmail or Yahoo account should result in minimal spam.

Nature & Travel Photography
Main Entrance

One my site used to get a lot of spam comments. Since I added a random question that people can "easily" answer and checking that the form was submitted in a reasonable amount of time ( between 3 seconds and X minutes ), I haven't seen any spam

I once posted an email address in public, and the next day I was hit by a car. Spent six months in the hospital. If only I had put the email address in an image...


___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

lol ... nice ...

suho, you made my day.

Hey, I do what I can. After all, my motto is: "When you can't say something useful, at least try to be funny."

I use a contact form with a checkbox for human valiadtion, I've never received a spam email through my website to date, and it's been almost 6 months.

So the funny part was...

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

I made a similar thing for a phpBB forum that was being flooded with bot accounts ... a simple listbox: "I'm a bot" (default), "I'm not a bot" and this does it really well. We haven't seen a single new bot account. While 'humans' have been able to register just fine.

quote:

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Arthurio said:

I made a similar thing for a phpBB forum that was being flooded with bot accounts ... a simple listbox: "I'm a bot" (default), "I'm not a bot" and this does it really well. We haven't seen a single new bot account. While 'humans' have been able to register just fine.

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It would be interesting to see how many of the "bots" were actually human...

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

well human or bot but anyone with cialis, viagra and penis enlargement related e-mail addresses are not welcome there ...

(Edited by Arthurio on 04-07-2008 15:31)

What about shock therapy related email?


___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

Oooo...Master Suho ups the voltage!

Shock therapy E-Mail!

Puuuuuure genius!

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

Forward this mail to 17 people by the end of ... now, or the Suho sign will shine upon you in 7 days. And then, there will be sparkles!



(Edited by poi on 04-07-2008 16:01)

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