Avoid Spam — Obfuscate Your Website Email Address
by Maggi Hall, E-Commerce Adviser staff (rev022108)

Every website needs to include at least one email link for visitors to contact you. Unfortunately, spammers use spam-bots to surf the Internet and harvest email addresses from websites.

For example, if you include a Contact Us link on your website, the default HTML would look like —


<A href="mailto:xyz@e-commerceadviser.com">Contact Us</A>

Spam-bots can extract the xyz@e-commerceadviser.com email address and add it to spam lists. The result is your legitimate Contact emails get mixed in with hundreds of spam emails.

Spam Solution.

There are different technique and tools available to help avoid spam. One solutions is to encode the email address, which hides the email address from spam-bots, but keeps the same appearance for website visitors. Below is an email obfuscating tool created by Web Design Options.