Who likes Spam?
Rick Borstein, FAAS Webmaster
I know I don’t!
Spam is unwanted “junk” email. Various estimates on the web indicate that somewhere between 50 and 80% of all email is spam.
Most clubs post the names of their board or key members on their web site. I think this is a great idea, but…
Spammers use “spiders” or “spambots” which troll the web and harvest email addresses from web sites. The spambots run 24/7 and harvest hundreds of thousands of email addresses daily.
If you add a mailto link on your website, that email address could be harvested by a spammer very easily!
Email Addresses in the Clear
Here is the source code of an ordinary mailto link, which is probably what you are using on your web site:
<a href="mailto:bob@aol.com">Email Bob</a>
If you put this on a page, you’ll see a link (in blue): Email Bob. When user clicks the link, it will launch their email program.
The full email address is “in the clear” in the code above. Ack!
Spammers look for the “at sign” which makes it easy to harvest a nice address to add to their database!
How to Hide an Email Addresses
A number of techniques use a combination of JavaScript and coded characters that do a good job foiling the spambots.
For example, a coded version of the Email Bob link (see above) might look like this:
<script type="text/javascript"> var sb1='il'; var sb2='ma'; var sb3='to:'; var sb4=' yo ur& #64;ema&# 105;l. com'; var sb5='My  Na me'; var sb6=''; document.write('<a href="'+sb2+sb1+sb3+sb4+'" onfocus="if(this.blur)this.blur();">'+sb5+'</a>'); </script>
That’s a lot of code to write yourself! Fortunately, there are easy to use alternatives.
Free Email Encoding Tools
My favorite free tool is Hiveware’s Enkoder.
This tool is free to use. You can find it at http://automaticlabs.com/products/enkoderform/.
Simply fill in the email address, the text you want on the web page, the title of the link and it will generate the code you need to use.
The Hiveware tool makes virtually unbreakable mailto links. It creates more larger, more complex code than the example I used above. I use it on faas.info. The only downside is that the code is quite large, so if you have lots email addresses to hide (more than twenty), your page byte count will grow larger and take longer to download.
Hiding Email Addresses using GoLive or Dreamweaver
If you use one of these programs, plug-ins (extensions) are available that are nicely integrated with the application. These plug-ins make it easy to insert and update encoded email addresses.
Adobe GoLive
SpamBlocker — http://golive.werk01.de/SpamBlocker/
Adobe Dreamweaver
Ultimailto— http://www.colmgallagher.com/ultimailto.asp