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Abstract

One source major of email addresses for spammers involves "harvesting" them from websites. This paper describes a proposal to allow a website owner to make illegal such automated extraction of email addresses. We propose a "no-email-collection" standard for websites and a mechanism to track spammers violating the standard. There are four parts to this proposal. The first part is to create special restrictions for non-human visitors as part of the Terms and Conditions of Use page for the website. The second part is to add a Meta Tag specifying the "no-email-collection" flag referencing the Terms and Conditions of Use webpage to each web page of the website. The third part is to add "no-email-collection" flag referencing the Terms and Conditions of Use webpage to the robots.txt file. Finally, the fourth part of the proposal provides instructions on the creation of "honey pot" email addresses to track violators.