In your backyard you will find good spiders and bad spiders – ones that help your garden and ones that can kill you. You will also find spiders on your website – good spiders that get your info listed on Google, Yahoo, and MSN; and bad spiders that can will harvest information for malicious intent or for sale to the highest bidder. As a site owner or designer, keeping the bad spiders at bay can save your internet life. One of the juiciest treats for these spiders is an unprotected email on a “Contact Us” page. It only takes a few days for an email address to be harvested and sold to the spammers. So here is the key here to How to Hide Email Address

There are many ways to protect yourself, some of which work and some don’t. The spiders get smarter, so avoiding them gets tougher. Here are several ways to keep those spiders from getting your email addresses:

* Use a web form: With this method, visitors to your website have to fill in the form to get in touch with the site’s operators. This will work, but most people don’t like giving out their information or prefer using their own email software for contacting others. Additionally, you can get spammed with the form itself.

* Use ASCII: Using a generator (http://www.carsel.co.uk/emailtool.html), you can change your email address (such as user@domain.com) to a string of ASCII characters, then encoded to HTML or Javascript.

Unfortunately, this method is not foolproof. Several spiders exist to easily re-code this to the email address.

* Use a database: Another solution is to have a database table with names, email addresses and an ID number. On your webpage create a dropdown from the database with option values equal to the ID and option texts equal to the name. Next you would create a form. In processing of the form, find the correct email address from the database using the selected value. Again, you are using forms and getting the same problems listed above.

* Use a graphic of your email address: Instead of putting text for your email address, you insert a graphic of it and add code to make it clickable (http://www.bluelinkwebs.com/devnotes/cloak_email/cloak_email.html).

This is one of the better methods of protection. However, lately spiders with OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities have been created. They could easily harvest an email clocked in this way.

* Use a server-side code using PHP or ASP: http://reliableanswers.com/js/mailme.asp. This is the best method for cloaking.

The bottom line is doing something is better than doing nothing. Any one of these methods is an improvement over putting an email address directly on a webpage. Feed the good spiders and starve the bad ones.

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For fuller coding information see http://www.sidestreams.com/?p=119

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