stop email harvesting -

[mrmtek]

We are running several web sites - and have been getting hit a bit with unwanted emails - double checked our logs and found some bot's that are not obeying our robots.txt.

so we have setup a trap of sorts : created a folder call emaillist and put a page with fake emails on it with a link to a asp page to log the robots ip address and other details, with that we can then gain the offending bots name and ip and place them on the banned list.

This wont stop them all but it may stop a few - anyone know of better ways to do this??

 

[Dollie]

You can effectively "munge" your e-mail address within your code and still have the mailto: links work properly. Several websites have pages devoted to how to do this. If you google for "hide e-mail address in html" you will get several good links.

HTH

 

[mrmtek]

yes we did this ages ago - what we are trying to stop is bad robots who specifically target email harvesting - we use this to identify bad robots who are looking in places they should not - in other words do not obey our robots test file. We are finding a lot of robots that do not follow proper instructions and we identify them and then block the access and pass this information onto other sites to verify there behaviour