I thought I would write this quick article following on from writing a basic web scraper to check whether a website's emails can be scraped - just to prove how vulnerable your site may or may not be to harvesters!
As a result I have put the "limited" but main part of the tool here on our website, and you can use it to search your site. You can try it here:
CHECK.
Note - as it is not intended to be used to harvest, I have disguised the actual email
addresses with # 's every other character.
The reason I say "limited" above is because this is a simple version of a full scraper, and as a result not all client-side JavaScript methods will be detected. This is because this is an on-line tool which has limited access to some functionality. But believe me, off-line solutions using libraries such as Python's selenium or ghostjs can easily process these client-side encoders.
Follow the link above and point and shoot!
Note this runs on a fairly slow server with limited bandwidth, not our main one, so if it crashes or times-out be
patient and try again!
Our service prevents scraping because your email address is no longer contained within the html code structure (or any other code such as JScript) on
your site.
Instead we hold the address on our server (once you have registered it) and release it only once we are sure a bona-fide visitor is accessing it.
Enjoy !
Get an Email Address Encryption key for the WEBEMAILPROTECTOR service and secure your website email addresses here GET-A-KEY page.
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