Preventing SPAM: Stopping email harvesting with norbt
Posted on July 2010
There are multiple ways for the spammers to collect your email address. One of them is by simply browsing web pages with a crawler (spambot) harvesting email addresses. If your email is public on the web, you are exposed.
With norbt you can prevent the harvesting of your e-mail by not exposing your email address directly.
How: Create a norbt containing your email address or contact details and publish the link to your norbt instead of your email address.
With this solution the spambots don’t have direct access to your email. The only way to get your email is to follow the link and answer the question which the crawler does not know how to answer.
The answer may be trivial, like “What’s my name?” or “What’s my website name?” to stop robots. Or something more complicated to limit access to a smaller group of people, like “What’s my pet’s name?” or “What’s my Nickname?”
As a plus you will get information regarding who has accessed the link and who has answered the question (seen your email). You can find more info on tracking your norbt visits.
Example: In norbt.com we have a link to our contact data instead of our email: contact us (https://norbt.com/TWPM5F).
You may also be interested in: email signatures with norbt