Dealing with Spam...continued

The form will hide your email address from lurking spambots and keep your email safe from exposure. It's also a good idea to use a Captcha Program within the form which protects your Web site against bots. Humans need to enter a text string in the form to engage and send the email but a SpamBot can't understand the format used by the Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart).

It's never too late to remove all mailto: tags from your current Web site and replace them with a secure form with Captcha as there are new spammers getting on board each day. If you're building a new site this is the time to be sure you don't expose any email addresses on it. Make your design/development team aware and take this very important measure into consideration. HINT: Just do it!!

There are some other methods that people have used to hide their email addresses over the years:

• Munging
  To munge an email address means to disguise it as such - bob@bobsdomain.com becomes bob at bobsdomain.com. There are other ways to munge an email address but in my opinion this method is deprecated and of little use, and is likely to offer little protection against spam bots.
• Obfuscation
This is a method adopted from programmers who use it to make their code hard to read for humans. When one obfuscates an email address it looks something like this in the Web page code:

<a href='&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#58;&#109;&#121;&#110;&#97;&#109;&#101;&#64;&#109;&#121;&#100;
/>&#111;&#109;&#97;&#105;&#110;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;'> &#109;&#121;&#110;&#97;&#109;&#101;&#64;&#109;&#121;&#100;&#111;&#109;&#97;&#105;&#110;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;</a>

and like this on the viewable portion of the page:

myname@mydomain.com

With the sophisticated (not that there's anything "sophisticated" about spammers) software applications in use these days that can even bring the most secure Captcha to it's knees, one has to wonder how well obfuscation really works. However, without question it is a far better solution than posting your email in plain mailto: form on your site.
• Javascript
  The below javacript by Tim Williams using an algorithm (cipher) to encrypt the email address and hide it from SpamBots. The site visitor needs javascript turned on to view the decrypted email address but the vast majority of users would have it turned on because of its widespread use on the Internet.
  
  <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
  <!--
  // eMail Obfuscator Script 2.1 by Tim Williams - freeware
  {
  coded = "MYQEBFM@MYQEBFM.OCE"
  cipher = "aZbYcXdWeVfUgThSiRjQkPlOmNnMoLpKqJrIsHtGuFvEwDxCyBzA1234567890"
  shift=coded.length
  link=""
  for (i=0; i<coded.length; i++){
  if (cipher.indexOf(coded.charAt(i))==-1){
  }
  else {
  ltr = (cipher.indexOf(coded.charAt(i))-shift+cipher.length) % cipher.length
  link+=(cipher.charAt(ltr))
  }
  }
  document.write("<a href='mailto:"+link+"'>Email me!</a>")
  }
  //-->
  </script>
  <noscript>
  <p>Sorry, but a Javascript-enabled browser is required to email me.</p>
  </noscript>

There are other methods that can be employed to effectively hide an email address from bots that scour the Web with the sole purpose of harvesting email addresses. PHP (a programming language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are another two examples. However, the point I am making here has been well covered and that is to keep your email address hidden from the bad guys who are visiting your site looking for it - maybe even as we speak. Start building a defence against spam and all the negative implications it presents

. This article is just the first of many coming in the future that deal with email and developing habits that will make using it more prolific for you and free up some time to get things that matter done.

Copyright 2011 The Technomax Group and Net Locations.com
Author: Wally Gross
You can use this article for non-commercial use provided you keep the above copyright and author notice in place.