Should You Be Worried About Spambots?

Spambots are automated software programs that roam the Internet looking for email addresses. They then gather them into a database that is used to blast junk emails to. Should you be worried about Spambots? After somebody published my email address on the web I was inundated with spam. I eventually had to resort to changing my email address. I'm now much more careful as to who I give my address to.

Spambots are able to operate because email addresses have a familiar presentation. They simply read pages on the web and search the code looking for addresses around an "@" symbol. There are also snippets of HTML code that bots can find such as "mailto". It doesn't matter whether these are found on webpages, chatrooms or on discussion forums; the spambot is able to use it.

There are a number of ways of trying to fool theses pieces of software. You could use an image with your email address or replace the "@" symbol with an (AT). Both of these mean that your link will no longer be clickable and open up the user's email client. Instead they will have to manually type in the email address.

A better solution is to use a contact form on your website rather than an email link. The form contents can be delivered to your email address, but it is a undetectable to spambots.

A more recent trend is the rise of Spambots that leave junk comments on forums and blogs. This is done to either promote a certain product or to simply leave links pointing back to a site. This second scenario can be useful to boost search engine rankings. The most up to date bots can even read the CAPTCHAS - those mangled letters that are meant to tell whether the form is being filled by a human or robot.

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