WebProWorld - View Single Post - Am I asking for more SPAM if I add E-mail addresses?

yugg · #9 (**permalink**) 06-17-2004, 02:28 PM

There are several ways to hide your email address, some more effective than others. The simplest is to have a Contact Us page with an entry box for people to type their queries in. If the form is then processed by a server-side script (eg Php, Asp etc), there is no way the spammers can get the address.

If you need to display your email, then the spammers can get your email address from anywhere it is displayed on a website. But most of them use robots to pick it up - they don't usually have the time for a human to search for addresses. So hide it from the robots, and you're reasonably ok (the exception is those work-from-home schemes which suck people into a marketing scheme then tell them to trawl the internet for email addresses themselves).

But first, just using a mailto: link without showing the address in the link text is no good, because, yes, the robots do read the Html source code which, of course, shows the address in full.

One way is to use Javascript to display it. However robots may just read the html file as text, just looking for the mailto: keyword, so you need to jumble up the email address, not have it as a complete string. And in particular, break up the mailto: keyword which the robots search for.

This is the code from one of my own sites. This goes somewhere between the <head> tags in your page Html:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">
//
</script>

and this goes in the the Html at the point where you want to display the email address:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">
//
</script>

The & #064; bit is the long code for the @ character (though no doubt some robots will look for that that also).

The spammers' robots won't dig the address out of that!

And by the way, I had to tick the "disable Html" in this post, as the forum system couldn't cope the javascript code above!