Viewing Thread:
"EMAIL SPAMBOTS"

Knowing that spambots crawl the net collecting email addresses & other relevant info to compile mailing lists,

is the spam sent to the collected addresses by a human or do the spambots auto send the spam?

Also do bots auto complete web mailing forms to send spam or are they completed by humans?

Thx in advance for any advice.

Tappet wrote:
> So based on that info a web form is the safest method,
>
> Would it be best to write the whole email form in PHP and
> include the destination address with in that code? or is that
> putting the address at risk too?
>
> What about leaving the destination address out of the
> script and once the submitted form has been validated retrieve
> the destination address from a database?

As long as the email address doesnt appear in the outputted html it matters little where you store it.

morning Garin,

Thx again for the info, ive been doing some research thro the night and understand the randomly generated image displaying some text is the best anti spambot method, but with new technology capable of reading text within an image i guess its 98% success rate will most likely start to fall as well.

Also, to protect your email from a determined harvester, never publish your address on the web, never include your address within any html code, never use href="mailto:address"

So based on that info a web form is the safest method,

Would it be best to write the whole email form in PHP and include the destination address with in that code? or is that putting the address at risk too?

What about leaving the destination address out of the script and once the submitted form has been validated retrieve the destination address from a database?

If a bot can parse fields to insert data then it can recognise what sort of field it is, so no reason to touch hidden fields.

im still a novice when it comes to coding.

I had the in mind

was wondering if a bot would auto complete a hidden field

then when validating the submitted form

check to see if the field is empty, if not empty quit validation and return to the form

I presume you mean a field thats hidden by css as opposed to .

Its impossible to answer what a spam bot may or may not do really. Theres alot of them, some stupid and some smart. So yes it probably fool some bots. Would it fool all bots? havent a clue.

Thx for the advice Garin

So on the subject of writing your own antibot mailing scripts, would a bot auto fill a hidden field within a form that a human can not see?

Email harvesting is done by bot and by humans, depends on the spammer.

And yes bots auto-complete mail form, depends on the nature of the forms and the spam involved though.

Knowing that spambots crawl the net collecting email addresses & other relevant info to compile mailing lists,

is the spam sent to the collected addresses by a human or do the spambots auto send the spam?

Also do bots auto complete web mailing forms to send spam or are they completed by humans?

Thx in advance for any advice.