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RE: Anti-spam email links in Javascript

for

From: John Hamman
Date: Apr 15, 2004 9:39AM

Has anyone considered programming a cloak for this? And just block email
catchers from the site?
john

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Brockington [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 10:59 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: RE: Anti-spam email links in Javascript

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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