[OT] Handling Returned Virus Mail

[Kay C Lan]

Jeffery Reynolds wrote:

one thing that has stemmed the tide for me is to start putting your
> email address on all your web posts as a java encoded text (there are
> several schemes out there to do this) instead of straight html. while
> this wont get rid of things immediately, it has slowed the tide a lot
> for me and many clients over the last couple of years since i started
> doing it....
> im sure there are some spammers out there that are now using
> bots to run the java scripts to see if they get any email addresses
> back, but thats not as easy.
>

You may wish to go one step further by reformatting every reference to you,
either on your webpage or in emails, into a graphic. At the most basic level
just take a screen shot of your own email text signature and crop it into a
small gif or jpg. On a website you will probably want the hyperlinks to your
email address and website to work so this will involve cropping each text
hyperlink into a graphic and then using code rather than plain html to make
the link as suggested above.

I think it will be a while before bots will be running OCR on gifs and jpgs
to see if they can extract an email address:-)

Of course, in some situations it means that you can't leave your signature,
which is why you won't see mine here.