Many spammers use bots to read e-mail addresses from web sites. They usually identify the “mailto:” tags in HTML code. Over the years, some have suggested to replace these tags with litteral strings, use javascript to hide addresses, etc. This may all work to a point.

However, we should not forget that spammers are in the business because they want to make money. A database filled with good e-mail addrresses is worth a lot of money. On the contrary, a database filled with trash e-mail addresses is worth nothing. Based on this assumption, Nathan W. Lindstrom developed Spam-X . This Perl script will create a web page full of useless e-mail addresses generated using random strings.

I am not convinced it will work but I will give it a try. Ours is at http://patrick.vande-walle.eu/scripts/mail.pl. As you guessed it, the main reason for this article is to be catched by spambots. If I can help in spreading an anti-spammer tool, I am always glad.