Let´s give spammers a

BADHARVEST

About

Last change:  Thu Dec 30 16:21:56 2004

BADHARVEST is a form-mail CGI script designed to be called from links similar to "mailto:...". It helps you to hide email addresses from "harvesters" (automated email-address collectors) while still providing a convenient way for your visitors to contact you.

This tool was inspired by an article in the German "linux user" magazine, which introduced some techniques for address-hiding which I did not consider to be satisfying. :-)

The Problem

Last change:  Thu Dec 30 16:23:36 2004

Spam - junk email - has become a major problem for people using the internet. There are two ways to fight it:

• You can install a program wich filters your mailbox and tries to sort out unwanted mail.
• You can try to keep your address secret. Public web pages are a major source of email addresses, and spammers use so called "harvesters" to collect them.

However, some times you want your address to be accessible, but of course not to the harvesting robots. There are some tricks to hide your address, but they have several disadvantages:

• They rely on the user to perform certain actions (as removing a
  --NO-SPAM-- from an address)
• They can easily be circumvented (as encoding the address into HTML entities) or
• They involve ECMAScript (JavaScript), meaning those solutions won´t work in text browsers or for users which turn it off for security reasons

BAD HARVEST´s Solution

Last change:  Wed Jun 9 13:49:10 2004

BADHARVEST targets the mailto: part of an email-link. It usually looks like this:

This is just what they are waiting for out there. Instead, you give BADHARVEST a list of email addresses. Then you use a link to the script, telling it which one you want to use:

When the user clicks on the address, BADHARVEST will diplay a familiar "Send email"-form and send the mail to the address, still keeping it secret to the public.

Now there is still a readable address in the code. You can hide this by simply using an image:

Or, to be more friendly to text browsers, just an image for the "@":

Download

Last change:  Mon May 17 10:49:58 2004

BADHARVEST is Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

You can download it from the project page at

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/badharvest

Contact the author

Last change:  Fri May 14 21:04:02 2004

This program was written and is maintained by Florian Berger, a Graduate Engineer of Media Technology from Leipzig, Germany.

Contact the author at

Yes, this is BADHARVEST at work!

Rate BAD HARVEST!

Last change:  Thu Aug 19 08:47:22 2004

You are welcome to rate BADHARVEST at Hotscripts.com:

Or got to the site at needscripts.com and rate it there: