Protecting Email Addresses

The easiest way to stop email harvesters getting your address off a web page is by not putting it there in the first place!

There are various ways of 'confuscating' addresses, most of which use JavaScript but none of them are likely to be totally successful.

Instead of an email address give your users a response form to fill in and send. You may have to protect against robot form submitters but that's probably the easier option.

If you MUST have an email address on a page, add it in html in the following format and DON'T make it a clickable link.

me<code>@</code>mysite.com

This shows correctly, allows users to copy and paste it into their email client, but isn't seen by the automatic harvesters.

Hint: You can check whether the spam bots can 'harvest' email addresses from your pages by using the tool at:

http://willmaster.com/possibilities/demo/RetrieveEmails.cgi