Beat Spam

 
The Spam problem
Don't you just hate all those unsollicited offerings clogging up your mailbox. Well, we do; it easily accounts for 90% of the emails we receive. So we took measures to beat it.

 

Stop the spread
As most of you know by now, posting your email address on a website is a sure-fire way to guarantee a healthy dose of spam delivered to your Inbox for years to come. We've been doing that in previous years and must now suffer the consequences. While we can't stop the spammers that have already gotten hold of our email address, we can prevent new email harvesters to find it.

The trick is to encode all addresses using numerical equivalents and, more importantly, wrap the result in JavaScript. The final product will be rendered correctly by your browser, but will be nearly-indecipherable by most email harvesting robots.

We've been using Hivelogic Email Address Encoder as a starting point, but modified it a bit, in case the harvesters are looking for the specific javascript structure this encoder produces. To hide things even more, the javascript code can be separated from the html file an address is shown in.

Apart from our own email addresses we'll be obfuscating all player's addresses too, so participating in the MindSports Arena won't increase your spam pressure.
We started encoding email addresses when the restyled MindSports site opened in July 2002.

 

Using our email address on your site: don't
While we appreciate the acknowledgement of other sites by presenting a link to MindSports, we're less enthousiastic when our email address is published there too. For one, it's unnecessary, because linking to our site would always present the correct contact info. Secondly, it's often not obfuscated, which kind of defeats our efforts to hide our addresses from the email harvesters.
If you feel it's necessary to present a MindSports email address on your site, please first to request permission. If we agree, we'll provide you with instructions on how to publish our address.
Never ever post our address in plain html!

 

Getting rid of spam
If you like to do something about all the spam you already have to contend with, then you need to take additional measures yourself. There are several approaches to do that, some more successful than others, but there's no 100% cure for it (yet?).

Here are some links to sites with a lot of info on what you can do:
Fight Spam   Fight Spam on the Internet!
CAUCE   The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email

 

Disclaimer
While we do our best to make the life of the harvester robots as hard as possible, we can't guarantee it will be 100% effective. Since the visitors of the MindSports site are presented with working mailto links, it's feasible - though highly unlikely - one writes a robot that can read them too.