Problems with Asian Spam

[Jef Poskanzer]

>> > You can use JavaScript to obfuscate the addresses you post to your 
>> > websites.  For instance, instead of using:
>> 
>> This sort of thing is useful, and I have used it myself for several
>> years. But I don't think it's true any more that it confuses robots.
>> They've got very sophisticated recently,
>
>Unless the robot has a complete JavaScript interpreter built-in, it will
>not figure out the address from the code given.  I'm not saying that
>they can't have an interpreter, but I highly doubt it.  They'd rather go
>for the low-hanging fruit by parsing plain-text than bog down their
>systems interpreting JavaScript.

Yeah.  I mean if these harvesters did interpret JavaScript, we could
put infinite loops on our pages just for them.

And if they some sort of loop detector logic, then we could make the
computation to yield an email address take a few seconds.  Not a problem
for someone viewing the page, but a big problem for a spammer trying
to process millions of pages.
---
Jef

       Jef Poskanzer  jef at mail.acme.com  http://www.acme.com/jef/