Do you want to hide the email address you use for your website to stop spammers from harvesting it?
You want to use your email address so that your viewers have a way to contact you if they have any comments or questions. So you need to put a "mailto:" link on your webpage.
But this causes a big problem: spammers want your email address. So they send out a robot with the mission of finding and capturing all the addresses it can. This is done by examining the HTML code used by browsers to render each webpage. All the bot has to do is save the email address it finds in your "mailto" link.
The old-school methods for "hiding" an email address:
* Munging. In this method, the email address is not put in a link. Rather it is supposedly hidden from the bots by substituting words for various parts of the address. Example: johndoe AT hotmail DOT com
* Encoding. The most common code used is standard ASCII code. Each letter or symbol in the email address is replaced by its equivalent. A simplified address a @ b.com would be coded as:
& #97; & #64; & #98; & #46; & #99; & #111; & #109; ( spaces were added to prevent the browser from printing the letters )
The "mailto:" link can still be used, because the browser will recognize the code and print out the real email address on the page.
But these methods no longer work.
These methods may have worked when they were first introduced, but one should never underestimate the intelligence of the hackers who program the spambots. There are new bots that can decode both of these email encryption techniques.
As you might imagine, good programmers exist that can think of other numerous ways to cloak an email address. Searching Google for "hide email address" shows over 2,000,000 results. Many of these likely are better methods than the two above.
So what is the next step for me?
You don't need to go through all of those results from Google. I devised a method which I am absolutely certain will protect your email address from any and all robots. How can I make a statement like that? Because I don't think a hacker could easily locate the address himself, and the job of programming a robot to do it is practically insurmountable.
The method I use hides the address in a javascript that is in a separate web file in a completely different folder on the website. It does not appear anywhere in the HTML code of the webpage. Yet it DOES appear on the webpage itself where anyone can see it -- but the bot doesn't have eyes!
Are you convinced? So-called "experts" have told me that it can't be done. Well, take a look for yourself. Just visit my webpage shown in the next paragraph, and you'll see how it works.
Author Resource:-
Visit the author's website, Professor's Coding Corner for useful code snippets and tutorials on interesting aspects of web programming. In particular, the article, Stop Spambots will show you the best way to protect your website.
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