We all get spam and we all hate spam. We all do not read spam and we just delete spam. But still there are tons of spammers out there. And there are tons of spamming bots out there that crawl the web reading your pages usually looking for the @ sign. Since this is a signal that it has found an email address an it can save that address for use later on spamming a bunch of emails these spam bots have saved. And another sign will be the mailto:email@address.com found as a value of the attribute href in the “a” tag.
With this in mind, these spam bots will just to through every line of code you have on your webpages, looking for the @ and the mailto:. And a simply way to minimize that is by using the Spam Minimizer which is a simple script to minimize spam by converting all characters into their UTF-8 equiavalent that can be rendered by browsers.
Download spam-minimizer.zip here. Once downloaded, the instructions are very easy.
Spam Minimizer requires PHP which most servers and hosting accounts are enabled today. And all you have to do is copy the file in the folder where you plan to use Spam Minimizer. Make sure the file that you will use the Spam Minimizer is a PHP file and anywhere in the beginning of that file, like in the head section, you simply add:
Then whenever you need to have a link to your email in this format:
Do this instead:
Note: This is not totally prevent spam. It just minimizes the occurences having spam bots read the code and all they will see is UTF-8 Code.
That’s all, Happy Programming!
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