Stopping the Spam Bots (or at least slowing them down)

Tired of dealing with spam in your inbox? Wondering how they ever got your address? Well insidious little software programs called spambots continually crawl websites harvesting email addresses.

How to deal? You can substitute the word 'at' for the symbol '@' in your email address. Like this...

• tom.gray'at'gemsolv.com (Please replace the 'at' with @ in your email program)
  

...but that's a little awkward and it requires your visitors to actually do something. Always dangerous as they may find it easier to hit the back button then cut, paste and substitute to email you.

Here's a clever software solution to prevent spambots from harvesting your email addresses... Email Address Encoder from West Bay Web encodes your email address into a decimal format which most spambots will ignore at the code level of your web site but looks like plain English to your visitors.

For example, in my source code, my email address looks something like this after I've run it through the encoder:

<a href="mailto:&#116;&#111;&#109;&#046;&#103;&#114;...

...while visitors will see: tom.gray@gemsolv.com .

Pass this web address on to whoever maintains your web site and have them replace all of your site's listed email addresses with their encoded counterparts and prepare yourself to spend less time cleaning spam from your inbox!

• Go to: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html¹

By the way, you can also just substitute the @ sign in your email address with its decimal equivalent and likely achieve the same effect. Change your html source code to look like this...

<A HREF="mailto:name&#64;domain.com">Contact Us</A> and what you'll see on the page itself is Contact Us.

Thanks for reading,

tom.gray@gemsolv.com

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(¹Note: Obviously, you want to test this in your own browser. I tested my encoded email in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x, Mozilla Firefox 1.07--what a browser should be--and AOL Ver. 9 and it worked like a charm, be sure to test your emails before relaunching your pages.)