Stop Email Spam with Java Applets

Introduction
One day a certain Mrs Abacha asked me for a favour by e-mail. She is the widow of a certain Nigerian general who died under mysterious circumstances. In return she offered a few hundred million dollars. This was clearly a spam mail. Spam bots, or email harvesters are the tools used by spammers to collect email addresses. These are comparable to spiders of search engines like Google. However, they have an easier task and require less processing. If you have an established website you are equally likely to be visited by a search engine crawler as by a spam bot. Most websites have at least one contact email address embedded in its web pages. As long as your e-mail address is available in text form, you can be targeted by spammers.

One way to minimize spam is to use disposable e-mail addresses, for example: sneakemail. Sneakemail forwards e-mail for free to your real address and gives you a fake e-mail address. If you receive spam, you just have to delete your sneakemail account and make a new one. Still you probably will have to do this every time a spambot visits your site. Another solution is using javascript encoding for the e-mail addresses. This also doesn't guarantee a spam free mail box, because spam software programmers have found ways to deal with this also. Some experts suggest putting your e-mail address in an image, assuming that people wouldn't mind starting their e-mail program and typing the e-mail address. Unfortunately this will only work if your visitors really need to get in touch with you. The best thing to do is to put your email address in a binary file like a java applet, because spam bots are not able to read applets. This requires some extra work, but you can get the source code for the applet here for free.

The applet tag
The applet will contain a button. If the button is clicked the e-mail program will appear ready to send an e-mail. You will need to do two things to set this up. First, you need to put an applet tag in an appropriate place on your website. This is an example:

<applet code="EmailHider.class" width="100" height="30"> 
	<param name="backgroundColor" value="#0000ff"> 
	<param name="buttonColor" value="#d000cc"> 
	<param name="buttonTextColor" value="#0000fc"> 
	<param name="buttonText" value="Send Mail"> 
</applet>

You need to specify the width and height of the applet . You can give the button an appropriate label like "Send Mail". By default if the buttonText parameter is unspecified, the button text will be the same as the e-mail address. It is also possible to change the background color of the applet, the button color and even the color of the button text by supplying the hexadecimal value of the color.