Educational Technology for Healthcare Education
Educational Technology for Healthcare Education
Regrettably, the volume of unsolicited commercial email, or 'spam', is now so great that it's overwhelming personal mailboxes and institutional networks, and is turning email from a boon into a bane. One of the means by which spammers garner email addresses is by 'harvesting', whereby automated programs - 'spambots' - roam the WWW from site to site, looking for any text that appears to be an email address and adding it to the spammer's database. Consequently, putting an email link on to a public website is effectively asking for spam.
To avoid the attention of spambots, this site avoids, wherever possible, using whole email addresses and links, such as jo.bloggs@home.asleep.com. Where addresses are listed, they are where practical either 'munged', using techniques such as replacing letters with HTML character codes [1] using address encoders [2], or disassembled. In the list of SONET members the first part of the member's address (eg dave.hilton) is listed apart from the second part (nottingham.ac.uk).
Thus you, the end-user, may on occasion need to re-assemble an email address and type it into your email software in order to contact people referred to on this site, although we have tried to avoid this where possible. This is a little more onerous than simply clicking on an email link but it does significantly reduce the risk that anyone mentioned on this site will end up on a spammer's database. Unless they're on one already, of course :-(
[1] A useful article on this is Encoding Email to Prevent Spam on the Ohlone College web author's site where you can also find other useful web authoring resources. Another article is Revealing your hidden email addresses which has a link to ready-rolled and free CGI scripts which you can use to foil spambots.
[2] A few useful encoders are:
Page last updated 28 March, 2012 . Site maintained by Fred Riley.
