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Re: Re: Anti-spam email links in Javascript

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Apr 13, 2004 7:43AM

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, Mike Brockington wrote:

> I probably didn't spell this out initially, but if the accessibility
> requirements preclude a suitably secure option, then the result will be
> that no email addresses will be displayed at all.

Secure? Accessibility doesn't really disturb your spam filters, does it?
And it's really not a matter of security but avoiding nuisance.

> Please try and look at this from the opposite angle

Opposite to what?

> - I have
> this information which has not previously been made available; how do I
> best present it to ALL of the public.

By writing the E-mail address as visible text, with a preceding note that
tells it's the address for... You can optionally make it a mailto: link
too.

> Incidentally, since the site in
> question belongs to a public body, it is also subject to Freedom of
> Information Legislation, so refusing to display contact details is not a
> long-term option.

Of course, it never was a reasonable option.

> This also means that some of the email addresses in
> question cannot be filtered,

Huh? I don't know what you mean by that, but surely such problems are
outside the scope of this list. Talk to the local IT staff. It is surely
not a long term solution to "spam-protect" E-mail addresses by making the
addresses available in munged form only. Sooner or later someone will put
the address somewhere as such, and it will be harvested. If you had relied
on the protective effect of address munging, the problem will be bigger
then than it is now.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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