e-mail coding

How to reduce your exposure to spam

Outline: A simple method to hinder the capture of e-mail addresses by software robots specialised in e-mail gathering for spam and virus spreading purposes.

Explanation

One of the most common methods used by spammers to "harvest" e-mail addresses is to crawl the web, looking for the @ character followeb by a valid domain name: e.g., smith@domain.name.

Thus, one of the simple ways to sidetrack them is to elliminate this character and every thing that looks like an e-mail address, such as the URL beginning with:

<A HREF="mailto:...">

The short script introduced below transforms the text line (upper box) on the corresponding ASCII character sequence (lower box). Then, it suffices to copy this sequence in the page source.

Notes

1. In case of a link "mailto:...", code both the visible address AND the invisible link associated to it (which is visible on the page source).
2. If the open text exceeds 42 characters, the resulting code might be incomplete; to overcome this limitation, please split the initial text line.
3. Avoid the accents in the open text, since these translate to different characters in other alphabets.
4. Make sure you add the coded characters to the page source and not the page text viewed on an WISIWIG editor.

To find a practical example of this method, check my contact page.

This method is far from perfect but offers a good protection enhancement for a minimal cost.