Let me tell ya somin bout -How To Cloak your Email address from spambots
by KoKoPelli WOR

The Dilemma

So you have a website. Of course you want the world to see it. You also want customers, visitors and potential clients to be able to contact you. Lets face it, there are many reasons to make your email address available to the public. Something to remember when placing your email address on your website, it becomes available to everyone and everything, spam-bots (any program that collects e-mail addresses from the Internet in order for sending spam) and site-scrapers included.

Possible Solutions

One: Never post or display your email address on public pages of your website. Instead only display your email address on pages that are available to registered users. This is easily accomplished when you use Content Management Software that uses memberships and user registration to host your website. Like DotNetNuke (an open source asp.net server application) or any server application(PHP,ASP,  etc.) that has public and private pages. For more information on using DotNetNuke please visit DotNetNuke Hosting.

Two: Use a contact form that visitors can fill out and submit. Make sure that the form sends the email from the web server and not the visitors pc. There are many free feedback, contact, and guestbook programs that you can use on your site. You can find some by doing a web search on "feedback form script" or "contact form script" or "guestbook form script" (Tip: Don't include the quotes when searching). KoKoPelli says use some form of CAPTCHA for any public user input. If you are using DotNetNuke KoKoPelli has a tutorial and a download for registered users called " Adding CAPTCHA to DNN Feedback module " and a tutorial on using CAPTCHA for DNN Portal Sign-up and Login.

Three: Use an image to display your Email address. A human user can read the email address and use it to send you an email and spam-bots usually don't bother collecting images. But use with caution as users with sight disabilities may not be able to read it nor will screen readers and text based browsers (Tip: KoKoPelli says if you add the image alt tag and use the technique that follows within the alt tag your email address will be more available to legitimate users i.e. ' alt="Load image for my email" ' and ' alt="Email me at greg dot turnstep.com" '). KoKoPelli says a better way then an image is to add spaces and the word "at" instead of  @ and adding the word "remove" to your domain i.e."  myemail at my REMOVE domain . com "   allows screen readers and text based browsers to read your email address to human users.

Four: The use of JavaScript to inject your email address into the users browser window has become very popular. Most spam-bots do not use JavaScript and prefer to collect the easiest addresses that they can. One way to do this is to add either of the following code to your page where you want to display your email address (Tip: Add your correct information to the domain and user vars). There are more complex scripts that do encoding also available for free, just do a web search for   "javascript to hide email address" without the quotes.

JavaScript code example 1: <script language="javascript">
<!--
var Domain = "turnstep.com"
var Mailme = "mail" + "to:" + "greg@" + Domain
document.write("<form>");
document.write("<input type=\"submit\" value=\"Send me some email\" ");
document.write("onclick=\"parent.location=Mailme\"> ");
document.write("</form>");
// -->
</script>

JavaScript code example 2: <script type=text/javascript>
var _u = "someone";
var _d = "somewhere.com";
var _l = _u + "@" + _d;
var _m = "Click Here to E-mail Me";
document.write("<a href='mailto:"+_l+"'>"+_m+"</a>");
</script>

Five: There is a very simple and easy way way to help hide your email address from spam-bots, but it is also not that effective. You can replace the "@" symbol with the html character entity for it i.e. jqpublic&#064;exzzzample.com . The "&#064;" is another way of writing the "@" character.

Conclusion: Spam and Spam-bots are terrible things. Using any of the above suggestions can only help prevent email address harvesting but not completely stop spam-bots and spam. There is always a way for spammers to circumvent your defenses. The most important thing to realize is that if you post, display or sign-up with your email address any where in the public domain there will be internet abusers who will abuse it, any steps you take to help prevent this abuse is a very good thing.

KoKoPelli says "Fighting spam and internet abuse is everyone's responsibility and we should all do what we can to help prevent it". Look for more articles and tutorials from KoKoPelli. KoKoPelli speaks @ tHe DoGs BloG Does KoKoPelli know anything? You Decide

William OttO Rawson creates custom software and hardware for Point Of Sale systems, Internet, websites and custom modules for DotNetNuke (DNN). WORTech Designs provides many Internet and eCommerce solutions.

KoKoPelli WOR may be contacted at http://www.wortechnologies.com