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RE: Anti-spam email links in Javascript

for

From: Michael R. Burks
Date: Apr 15, 2004 11:02AM


All,

One would hope these proposed solutions would accessible to people with
disabilties.

Sincerely,

Mike Burks

-----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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