egafd.com

Is it best on a website to have an HTML form for people to contact us on rather than list the respective contact email addresses?

I've been advised to do this due to spammers harvesting email addresses that are listed on web pages.

Have I been advised correctly? Any advice?

If you do go the HTML/php form route use one that at least uses a CAPTCHA. This basically means that it needs a human element to submit the form. It's not perfect and spammers can work thier way round them.



You might want to take a look at Blue Frog which will opt you out of spammers lists. It's a grwing community and seems to have some effect.



Another one I have had success with is Spampoison. I just set up a robot trap with the robots.txt file and directed them to a page with honeypot email addy's and a link to Spampoison

I wrote a spam bot killer once, My host 1 and fucking nOne at the time deleted my account

I basically set a time between my pages, so that if you viewed more than X many pages per X many seconds, you was a robot, so then i checked the referer against a list of acceptable IP ranges, and then the rest i have them an infinate number of email addresses t harvest.

The host claimed i was 'lagging' the server.

If you go PHP remember to end your headers with \r\n so spammers cant use header injection.

I personally used 3 checks.

Check the incoming IP Address, if it aint the server it aint working.

Ensure the email is part of the DB

If you know you are sending 1 email, or 10 email, you can use the while function that does the mailing with a counter, to make sure your mail() command only send the right number of emails, if it tries to send more exit().

There are half dozen more methods to protect your email addresses with forms, but the above are what i use.

Ok thanks to both Cenobitez and Jaques for your advice which I very much appreciate. I will check them out tomorrow when I have a bit more time so thanks again.