spambot


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spambot

A program (spider, bot, crawler) on the Internet that gathers email addresses to send spam to. There are countless email addresses on website "contact us" pages as well as on blogs and newsgroups. Since they are typically coded in the "mailto" format, which when clicked, causes the address to open an email message window, they are easily located (see mailto:).

Preventative Measures
In order to prevent a spambot from automatically identifying an email address, some websites print the address as text and not a clickable mailto: link. Another maneuver is to spell out the symbols with the words "at" and "dot;" for example, "joe at computerlanguage dot com." This requires the user to correct the address by inserting the @ sign and period before sending. A more elaborate approach is to make the address really obtuse (see email obfuscator). See spam, form spam and bot.
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For more information on the dialogue, kindly send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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