Interesting idea...but could a crawler not just incorporate some AI like LLava2 or convert the SVG to a JPG and use OCR to get the email addresses out?
It just seems like this adds a couple of steps to existing crawler scripts.
Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
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Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#72this works if you write it into the html on fullmoon tuesdays :
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#73Kind of neat but I would rather just have a “throwaway” email if I was sharing globally.
In my case, I setup an email alias with a sieve rule (if email sent to alias move to “public inquiry” folder). Prior to processing rule, spam assassin takes care of the non technical folks that couldn’t be bothered to run their spam campaign through spam assassin testers. Or even nontechnical folks that wouldn’t know how to setup their domain for sending email (spf, dkim, dmarc, …)
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#74> even when a human visitor has their JavaScript turned off, the email address displayed on the page remains usable NoScript on Firefox with default settings don't render tags (replaces them with placeholders), so this technique doesn't work here. https://imgur.com/2tCAgAf
uBlock Origin can block JS too FWIW. There’s a convenient button for it in the extended menu.
Thank you, didn't know that!
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try to query it though via document.querySelectorAll('a') for example. It's a good first line of defense as a lot of scraping techniques do this approach. However, if you have a headless browser setup for scraping, and simply fetch the current URL while on the page[0], you can get the plain text, and do a regex search for email addresses which will get you the email address - albeit this is a strange approach to take…
> It's a good first line of defense as a lot of scraping techniques do this approach. Most basic scrappers, the ones that are not for your testing or devtools or automation or ... Actually use basic text, without any interpretation. They grep the source code, they don't run a dom and javascript engine, because it's a major difference in computing needs and speed. I am not saying there is no evil scrapper doing dom ev…
Absolutely. The basic tools just fetch sites recursively and use regular expressions. The advanced tools are Chromium-based, so will render SVGs just fine (and then potentially run OCR / AI to extract text even from JPEGs).
This technique protects from a "neither here nor there" subset of programs, I wonder how large is that set in practice.
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#76> Email addresses published on webpages usually need to be protected from email-harvesting spambots. Do they though? I have had my email address published on my website in a I use both Gmail and (for some other addresses) a webmail hosted by a local company which uses some other filter. Both work well, so it's not something only Google can do.
this used to be a problem in the early 00s. I don’t think spam filtering was as good back then so protecting your public email from spam was necessary.
Also this was a time when mail boxes were often allocated 10-25 megabytes. So spam bots could easily flood your email.
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#77Heavily guarded fortress would indicate something of value inside, and the big crooks may spend a little more effort. In the age of AI, this becomes even easier. { "model" : "gpt-4-turbo", "messages" : [ { "role" : "system", "content" : [ { "type" : "text", "text" : "return a json array of all valid emails found in the image." } ] }, { "role" : "user", "content" : [ { "type" : "image_url", "image_url" : { "url" : "da…
It won't make sense cost wise though
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#78My domain: 24 years registered to me. A .com.
My email address: Listed at the top of the front page. In a H3 tag.
This email address's spam problem: Not a problem. 15ish per day get to me including Junk folder. Thanks Purelymail.
What is a problem: Transactional email unrelated to transactions, Promotional email which is newsletter junk spam, Social networks complaining of not being used.
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#79a much easier way is to convert the email address into html entities. It then displays and can be copied, but the actual source code doesnt have the email address.
Re: Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
#80i bought an premium .app domain a few months ago. not published in websites yet. no history of previous owners. just a fact that it's listed as a premium domain on registrars.
first emails I received after the gmail welcome email were b2b sales from construction companies (i'm not in this field), shopify optimizations (i don't run one), agencies suggesting how i improve the ui/ux of my site (no website yet).
thankfully, they're all in the spam folder. i'm using google workspace.
i believe these spammers get their leads on newly-registered domains. so, how do we protect ourselves from that?