5 WAYS HIDE YOUR EMAIL FROM THOSE ACCURSED SPAMMERS
If there's anything more loathsome than spam, its those filthy spammers themselves. Protect your email address from email harvesters using the following simple steps..
The curse of the internet age has you filled with dread every time you want to check your email. Here are a few ways to ensure your email stays pretty much yours.
1. Do NOT put your email addresses on every last page of your website
Agreed, you want your clients to find you fast, from any page of your website and easily. And in a utopian world, this would be perfectly agreeable. But the devil tried to take over heaven, everyone was generally upset and the end result is drug dealing pimps, violent robbers and spammers. Thus, to minimise chances of your email address being harvested by email spammers, limit the number of times it physically appears.
2. Obfuscate your addressses in the one page that they appear on your website. They ARE on one page, right?
Method #1
A quick way to hide your email address is to replace the "@" and the "." in your email address with their unicode equivalents. Before you start hyperventilating, let me expound.
Your email address usually looks something like this,
yourname@yourdomain.com.
In your source code, you can replace the "@" and the "." like so:
yourname@yourdomain.com.
See what i did there? If you didn't please close this browser window and never come back.
Method #2
You can also use comments to further confuse email harvesters and bots like so:
yourname<!-- >@. -->@<!-- >@. -->yourdomain<!-- >@. -->.<!-- >@. -->com
3. Use javascript
A more complex, but safer way is to use javascript to parse your email address. This is an almost foolproof method and unless someone actually visits your website, they aren't going to get your securely hidden email address.
<script language=javascript>
<!--var contact = "Contact us"
var email = "yourname"
var emailHost = "yourdomain.com"
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + email + "@" + emailHost+ ">" + contact + "</a>" + ".")
//-->
</script>
4. Use a web form
Personally, I think this works best. You give your clients the option of saying what they want to say in a more structured manner. Have clients fill in their names, their email addresses and their comments and set up a page to collect the information and send it to you. Kind of like we've done here.
5. Encrypt your address
Use this form at hivelogic.com or this one at hide-email-script.com to encrypt your mail. It doesn't matter what sort of bot or harvester is looking at your email address, they aren't going to make out a single line of your address. This method creates some random-looking gibberish that will require Galileo's genius and the enigma machine to decipher.
