Spam Proofing Your Web Site
– by Ian Cook

Spam sucks.

I think we're all in agreement with that sentiment. But did you know that you're literally giving spammers your email address whenever you post it in plain view on the internet?

Yup, they send their little automated spambot email harvesters all over the web looking for email addresses. Once collected, they're sent on to the mailing houses who then proceed to deliver all sorts of useful information on how you can save money on your mortgate.

I receive about 200 spams a day to my work address. And while I've developed methods of dealing with all the junk, it would still be nice to just not have to deal with it.

So for this month's article I've decided to take the suggestion of a reader and describe ways you can keep your email address hidden from the spambot email harvesters.

How Spambot Harvesters Find Your Email Address

An email harvester is an automated software program that visits web pages and searches through the HTML source code of the page in search of patterns of text that match the format of email addresses. Since email addresses must be in a certain form, it's really easy to write software to do this.

So the key to defeating these harvesters is to make it so a text string matching the pattern of an email address does not appear on the page. That's not to say you can't have your email address on the page, it just can't look like it.

Of course, you still need your visitors to contact you. It's convenient for them to click on your mailto: link and have their email client pop up with the To: address already filled in.

Don't worry, it's still possible to do this while protecting your address at the same time.

How To Deal

There are a few different categories of methods for keeping your email addresses inaccessible to spambots while still allowing your legitimate customers to contact you. Some work better than others. Here they are, in summary form.

1. Javascript
2. Email Obfuscation
3. Contact Forms
4. Hard-core back-end server stuff that's probably more trouble than it's worth

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