Foil the Spam Spiders!

If you have a website with your email address on it, you're leaving yourself wide open to so-called "opt-in" spam. Many spammers believe that email addresses on the Web are fair game, and they use harvesting software to collect them effortlessly. Then they sell them to other spammers, and before you know it, your email box becomes so clogged with junk email every day that you can barely find the important messages.

Here's a super-easy anti-spam-spider script:

To use this script, copy & paste it into Notepad, where you can personalize it. Then insert it into your HTML code where you would normally put a mailto: link.

This script will assemble the email elements (name, domain, and the label for the link) and deliver them to the browser. When you hover your mouse over it, it looks just like a regular link. But the spam-harvesting spider sees only raw html, so this is a fairly foolproof way to disguise your links.

Here's this code in action – when you hover your mouse over it, you'll see the full email address in your browser's status bar. As you can see, it's a fully clickable link!