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Posting Your Email Address
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Posted by: Okiewan---------------------
When posting your email address in a thread, you should put spaces in it. Example: you @ yourisp.com .
There are web spiders out there that "harvest" email addresses by scanning documents on the web, including pages in forums like this one. The space is enough to make them pass you by. Unless you want to potentially end-up on spammer's mailing lists, use the spaces!!
Posted by: Dapper---------------------
Good Tip :thumb:
Posted by: Chili---------------------
Okie how about if you put it as a link like in my signature? Does that save you or do the spiders still harvest the data from the link?
Posted by: Okiewan---------------------
Yes actually. They read the html that is the page, therefor would see that email address.
Posted by: biglou---------------------
Sweet! I'm gonna put Chili's email in ALL my posts! 
Posted by: High Lord Gomer---------------------
I've been using BigLug's email address for all of the "cooking" sites I visit.
Posted by: Smit-Dog---------------------
3 years ago I wrote a web spider that would crawl the classified ad web sites of 5 local newspapers each night. It would parse out the HTML and store all the ads in a database, including email address (if present) and phone number. Using the phone number, I then did a reverse lookup via AnyWho to get the address, city, state, ZIP, and stored that in the database along with the ad record.
A competing newspaper paid for development of the program. The resulting database was then used to target market the advertisers to advertise with their newspaper instead. Right down to "Dear Advertiser, we noticed that you are selling your ACURA in the Daily Times, please consider advertising with us! Here are our attractive rates...".
The classified ad business is evidently a very lucrative revenue stream. It was a pretty cool project. You could sort, filter, and report by ad category, ZIP code, city, area code, etc. You could say "Show me all car ads in the (248) 363-XXXX" prefix. Had a lot of fun telling coworkers what their neighbors were selling. 
The big problem was that we had no control over the format of the HTML stream, and the parsing engine tended to "break" whenever a newspaper changed their web site format slightly. Usually it only required a minor change to the program, but it was ongoing maintenance. The program would take a few hours each night to run, and we collected several thousand ads.
This was of course all illegal. After almost a year of web crawling, the project ended, mostly due to the constantly changing HTML stream.
Posted by: Chili---------------------
Quote:
Originally posted by biglou
Sweet! I'm gonna put Chili's email in ALL my posts!
|
Bastage! :scream:
Posted by: Green Horn---------------------
Damn the Spiders!!
Posted by: RJMCR500R---------------------
Thanks for the tip. Its good to know that something that simple,can work so well. 
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