Thanks for the nice comments one and all. Glad people found it useful. I refer you too to Andy Budd’s 24 Ways entry on using CSS3 to make this task a whole heap easier (and I also cover precisely this technique in my microformats book)!
My thoughts on anti spam harvesting are that its not only a losing but a lost cause. The cost in harvesting email addresses is such that pretty much no matter how they are obfuscated, they are easily tractable. Or, you can prety much make them up, hih is I suspect what mpst spammers do – send out millions of $%^&@adomain.com, just generating $%^&, or using a list of a few thousand very commonly used names.
And this comes from a lot of experience both trying to stop harvesters, and spam (I typically end up with in the order of hundreds of spam emails a day after all the tricks I can think of upstream.)
So, to me, it’s kind of an non issue – the challenge seems to me to make our contact details more accessible to legitimate harvesting (whether by people or software), and often anti spam harvesting techiques do precisely the opposite. This way we raise the value of our contact details, making the legitimate/illegitimate use ratio higher than it would otherwise be.
John Allsopp
Thanks for the nice comments one and all. Glad people found it useful. I refer you too to Andy Budd’s 24 Ways entry on using CSS3 to make this task a whole heap easier (and I also cover precisely this technique in my microformats book)!
http://24ways.org/2006/rounded-corner-boxes-the-css3-way
My thoughts on anti spam harvesting are that its not only a losing but a lost cause. The cost in harvesting email addresses is such that pretty much no matter how they are obfuscated, they are easily tractable. Or, you can prety much make them up, hih is I suspect what mpst spammers do – send out millions of $%^&@adomain.com, just generating $%^&, or using a list of a few thousand very commonly used names.
And this comes from a lot of experience both trying to stop harvesters, and spam (I typically end up with in the order of hundreds of spam emails a day after all the tricks I can think of upstream.)
So, to me, it’s kind of an non issue – the challenge seems to me to make our contact details more accessible to legitimate harvesting (whether by people or software), and often anti spam harvesting techiques do precisely the opposite. This way we raise the value of our contact details, making the legitimate/illegitimate use ratio higher than it would otherwise be.
thanks again one and all!
j