If you use mailto: links or put your email address on a web page, that email address will end up being ‘harvested’ by email spammers. These harvesters scour the internet, reading page after page, looking for Fortunately there are ways to avoid this. Unfortunately, none are (or will continue to be) 100% effective.
Our first recommendation is to never put your email address on your web site. But if you want to give your visitors a way to email you, how do you do that? By creating a form the visitor fills out. The form gives the visitor a place to type the information they want to convey while shielding your email address from the the programs (typically referred to as ‘spiders’ because they ‘crawl’ around the web looking for email addresses.) Autograph Systems provides a form script (link below) as part of our Sherwood Store web services.
If you must put your email address on your web site in plain text, please use one of the many obfuscation techniques that are available. Some are more effective than others; some require more work than others. The Project Honeypot link below describes a number of techniques, and the statistics link describes those along with others, and includes a graph reporting on the results from using them.
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