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RE: Anti-spam email links in Javascript

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From: Mike Brockington
Date: Apr 15, 2004 9:09AM

Folks,
Hopefully this is all the relevant parts of the spec:
My company provides IT support etc. to The City of Edinburgh Council.
We are currently re-developing the 'A - Z of Council Services' database. Essentially this a content-management system, written in JSP, with a SQL backend.
Many of the records contain contact information for that specific service, such as phone numbers, fax, minicom and in this new version, email addresses, for members of the public to get in contact.
The Council has spam filters applied to its email servers, however experience shows that these will always block a small proportion of genuine messages, and also allow through some undesirable messages. From intimate knowledge I can assure you that both of these situations are inevitable until such time as legislation becomes effective.
For some of our users it is unacceptable to miss a legitimate email from the public, and therefore, despite the drawbacks, have unfiltered email. Regardless of this, the shear wieght of spam currently poses a significant problem for us.
Therefore, my client WILL NOT allow me to expose email addresses directly. We both understand that there is a risk that the obfuscation may be compromised.
I am currently waiting for my client to make a decision, but the choices seem to be:
1. Mailto: link, obfuscated with Javascript.
2. Form-based page, where the link uses an ID reference to my database.
3. Both, with option 2 within a <noscript> tag
4. Both, side-by-side
5. No email contact.

Can we please try and cut out the rhetoric and possibly give a vote/score on the above? (I am fairly confident that if there were any other alternatives I would know of them by know - but feel free to correct me.)

Mike



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www.edinburgh.gov.uk/mpark
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