Simon Willison’s Weblog

New form of spam protection

11th September 2002

I’ve had an idea for a new way of hiding email addresses from spam harvesters—shield the address behind a form that must be submitted via POST. Site visitors can now click a button on my Contact page to reveal my email address. Spammers could always circumvent the system by writing a harvester that parses HTML pages for forms and submits every single one, but I’m hoping they won’t bother.