How do spamsters collect emails?

I ran across a wonderful javascript which claims to hide emails from spamsters. Take a look:

http://www.edginet.org/techie/websi...script.html#EAH

Now, I am rather confused. This code still spills out the email address on the page, so anyone can swing by and grab it. So unless spamsters usually get the emails from the source code, this script isn't any help. Do they usually get emails from source code?

Nevertheless, pretty cool script.

Bots.

Bots just walk around looking for things that look like e-mail addresses in HTML source, then pull them into a database. You can whip up a fairly functional one with Perl in about 30 minutes. Bots, however, can't generally execute JavaScript, so if the e-mail address is generated by a JavaScript, the bot won't see it - it will just see the JavaScript code which won't mean anything to it.

The flipside is that if the browser the user is using can't execute your JavaScript, they can't get the e-mail address either....

Thats not the ONLY was that smapsters get your emails though, sometimes big companys (such as eBAY) sell big lists of emails to advertising companys and then they send off gay spam emails to you. I'm not saying eBAY does that, just an example of a big web company...

-Rob

You're either 14, confused about your sexual orientation, or clueless.

Which one is it?

That's one step away from saying "yeah, I h8 teh gayz. Th3y suxors."

True, but I was responding specifically to his question about the "obfuscation" script so nyah!

BTW... eBay is partnering (or, should I say - extending it's existing partnership) with Doubleclick .... I wouldn't trust them not to sell your contact info. As a general rule, I don't put my real contact information on anything I don't have to, and I always create a temporary e-mail address for getting login info then delete it. If I do get a spam, I usually jump onto Linux and track the freaks down. Once I even managed to get the head honcho's e-mail address at the company being advertised and sent a colorful response to the spam straight to him. Never did hear from them again.

I still get about 4 spams a day, however - all sick pr0n which, based on the lame design and text, is eminating from one spammer. One of these days I'll get to hunting the bastard down... but this is a challenging one.... one of these days.

[edit]
Maybe they're happy spams? Besides - I get gay spams from time to time. Not as many of those as straight spams, but I do get them nonetheless.

Heh... I don't know why, but that sort of gross misuse of terminology (like 'bastard') just doesn't get to me anymore. Maybe I just tune it out now when people try to turn a legitimate adjective into a deragatory comment. After awhile, if you ignore it, it will probably go away of its own accord as people grow out of their prejudices.

What's wrong with having a problem with homosexual people? Seriously. Why not? Isn't it up to an individual how he/she feels about things? Sure, it's impolite (as far as being nice to people goes) to use derrogatory phrases like fag or that's so gay - but at the same time we accept the use of bastard.

On topic -> does anybody know of any worthwhile spam filte softwarer? Something intelligent that works!

nao

>>does anybody know of any worthwhile spam filte softwarer? Something intelligent that works!
spamassassin all the way. That thing got more intellegence than half of devshed members.

If you want to get on heaps of spam lists just start 'unsubscribing' from all the ones you get

Mozilla 1.4 seems real good at picking out spam. Too good infact. It's tagged every spam as such, but I always have to double check, because it also tags several real messages. It's getting better though, that dino has some smarts to it.

lol!
Mozarella 1.4 sounds good. I used to be afraid of missing important emails if I used a spam filter, but now I don't care. How much global bandwidth would you say is tied up on SPAM? I'm receiving more spam than ever since June...
I figured as much - I started opting out through their removal links... now have to put up with at least twice as much. There's got to be some way to do it! It's amazing how most people simply put up with SPAM... is it illegal to SPAM in any country? If not, why is it taking so long to get these laws passed?!

I'll try spamassasin (interesting how it lets you post assassin... two instances of a$$ - is that vBulletin being clever or just a miss?

nao

Ctb: are you suggesting that it's perfectly safe to display my email on the page, as long as it's encoded in the source?

There's no such thing as "perfectly safe". I'm saying that if you build the text of the e-mail using JavaScript instead of just hardcoding it right into the html page, you will stand a chance at defending your e-mail address. Most bots, for example, would hit this line:

And not understand it, so they'd skip it whereas most browsers would parse it and display the results. However, I make no guarantee that that's the case with all bots. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that some of the higher end 'tools' do have a JavaScript parser of some capability built in that could parse that and harvest the resulting e-mail address.

As far as a filter, there's a really cool Bayesian Perl filter that you can train to extreme effectiveness to keep up with changing spam methods. I'm too lazy to go look up the name, but Hero would know it right off the top of his head I'll bet (or, you could go googling).

Nao, as far as *phobia is concerned: yes, it's every persons right to have their own opinion regardless of what it is. Just remember that, contrary to popular belief, there IS such a thing as a stupid opinion if you can't muster any sort of logical defense for having it. It's every person's right as a free thinking individual to be as stupid as they want... some people just seem to exercise that right a little more than is good for them.

The filter is "Popfile", http://popfile.sf.net

And as far as intolerance- yes, you can be as intolerant as you want. Intolerance almost always hides insecurity (think about it. . .) and that's what most rational people understand.

Just shut up about your intolerance in a public forum. The person who has the answer you need may be offended by your idiocy.

I just wonder if he meant gay as in stupid. I realize it comes from the same root attitudes (that is, the reason that gay can also mean stupid), but at least it might not indicate being blatantly homophobic. Just a thought