This page answers the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) regarding Peter's scan4mail service. Because of the nature of the service (freeware), I can't give any support other than this FAQ page. Please feel free to send me your questions, findings and/or suggestions so I can include them in this page or in future versions of scan4mail.

Why this service?

Most of the spam is send to email addresses that are harvested from web pages. I was unable to find a way to see if my pages were vulnerable to email harvesters other than installing and using the harvester programs myself. That's why I developed the scan4mail page and because I thought this can be helpful to other site owners as well I decided to make it available to the world.

So I found email addresses with scan4mail,
what should I do now?

You should make your email addresses invisible to spam crawlers right away! The best way to protect you email address from being harvested and still have a working clickable link on your page(s) is by using JavaScript.

I do not recomment using email encoding as is also available on this site!

If you have a link on your page(s) that looks like this:

<a href="mailto:exposed@peterspages.net">exposed@peterspages.net</a>

Than you should change it in something like this:

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript" LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
document.write('<A HREF="mailto:exposed&#06'+'4;peterspages.net">exposed&#06'+'4;peterspages.net <\/A>');
// -->
</SCRIPT>

There are more sophisticated ways to make better protected clickable mailto links. These ways are described is the advanced section of scan4mail.

If you don't want to use JavaScript or don't mind not having a clickable link you can place an image with your email address on your page(s). You can convert your email address to an image with the mail2image converter.

I want to scan my whole site (automatically) and not just 5 pages

You'll have to register for the advanced version for which I ask a small registration fee. The advanced scan4mail service will scan your entire site starting from eg. http://www.yourdomain.url

register now!

Isn't this just another way to harvest email addresses?

No it is not. If I wanted to collect email addresses it would be silly to sit and wait till somebody enters an URL and scan that page for addresses. I would simply start a harvester program and collect tens of thousands of addresses within hours. At this moment all found email addresses are stored in a database but only for debugging purposes and statistics.
©2006 Peter's Pages - laatste wijziging: 07-10-2006