spam
Hiding mail-adress on a website
Nowadays it is often necessary to show the e-mail-adress an a homepage. Customers should see it, but there exist programs to find out mail-adresses from web-sites to use them for spam.
How can I hide my e-mail-adress from spam-bots as long as it is visible on homepages?
E-Mail Filters
Many people get huge amounts of mail every day. It can be painful to sort, categorize and handle all those mails manually. Furthermore, it costs a lot of valuable time that you could spend elsewhere.
However, there is an automatic approach that can save you a lot of this time: E-Mail Filtering
<strong>Challenge:</strong>
<ul><li>Choose an E-Mail client (either desktop client or web mail)</li>
<li><strong>Create the following filters:</strong></li><li>a filter that automatically labels mails from tuwien.ac.at with "TU" or moves them to a folder called "TU"</li><li>a filter that sends unwanted mails (containing words of your choice) to the spam folder</li><li>a filter that marks e-mails containing the words "Knowledge Management" as important (e.g. by flagging or starring)</li></ul>
Taggings:
Spam-Protect web forms
Spam is not only a problem for emails, but more so for web forms. Bots from spammers try to fill out forms all over the internet. But unlike in your email inbox, the data from your web forms normally does not get spam filtered, which makes spam in these cases an even bigger problem.
The goal is to add spam protection (CAPTCHA) to your web forms to make sure only humans fill in and submit the form.
Providing contact to website users
How to provide the possiblity to contact a certain entity is difficult for many companies and organizations. Especially for small NGOs, it is not possible to have a big mailing infrastructure and to maintain server-side spam filtering. Therefore, email addresses should not be published as plaintext. Nevertheless, the website of the NGO should somehow offer the possibility to contact the NGO. It is important that the technology used is widespread and cheap, since NGOs do not have a large amount of money to spend on specialized technology. If possible, open source software should be used. As the existing infrastructure (apache server, msql server) is offered for free, it should be used to solve this problem. The only important thing is that spamming should not be possible and the tool should guarantee that a human being is trying to make contact, not an (evil) software program.
