Do bots read vcards who are hosted on the server?

**Glasspoole** · Jul 20, 2012 02:32

Don't know if its the right forum for the question, but:

i ask myself if bots fetch vcards. I have a vcard on the server
and link to it that the visitors can import it to outlook, windows contacts and so on.
But that means that bots also can grab the vcf file and pull the email adress - right?

**Glasspoole** · Jul 20, 2012 02:47

Hi,

i wonder that i can't find an answer with google.
If we build hcards and but our email in, every robot can fetch it.
So making an inline image of the email-address makes no sense in hcards cause
"Microformats for Google Chrome" or "Operator for FX" or "Technoratis vCard - H2VX" can't read it.

Same with JavaScript. If we encode it so it's only visible if JavaScript is on, then we have the encoded email
in the vCard if we use the tools above.

So there is allot about Microformats out there, but who rights his email-address in plain
text on his site?

**xhtmlcoder** · Jul 20, 2012 02:54

If somebody wrote one to do so then it's feasible they could extract the details.

**xhtmlcoder** · Jul 20, 2012 03:09

You'd think not many people who are security aware would write their email in plain text. Though you would be surprised how many businesses do or at least should we say; most just use a mailto: I'd suspect there are far more pre-packaged generic spam robots designed to harvest and trawl normal webpages for mail. That in most cases many haven't thought of vCard but I'd suspect some scrapers are out there that do target them.

**Glasspoole** · Jul 20, 2012 03:16

How do we know?
Do you know? *lol

**Glasspoole** · Jul 20, 2012 03:24

To i get you right? You think most robots look for the mailto tag and not for the @?

I know that allot of stuff some people do don't work - like writing "[at]" instead of "@".
Robots are to smart today for simple things like [at]. There are robots who read captchas..

**Glasspoole** · Jul 20, 2012 03:26

Something here goes wrong. Whey are my two different threads mixed up?

**xhtmlcoder** · Jul 20, 2012 06:01

The green coloured administrators merged these two threads because they are very similar in nature.

I'd suspect some trawl for both @ and mailto: because usually the mailto: functions as a working hyperlink so doesn't need to display the same text as is seen via the browser.