Hide Your Email Address From Spam Bots

How to keep your email address hidden from automated spam bots.
Ordinarily, on a website, the webmaster will just include something like “mailto:me@mysite” in the HTML to make a clickable email address. That’s an easy and convenient way to share an email address.

Unfortunately, the web is crawling with Spam Bots that crawl websites searching for real email addresses. Guess what, if you’ve had your email address on a website for very long, its likely that you’ve been getting a lot more spam over time. Your email address was probably harvested by a Spam Bot.

What Can You Do To Hide From Spam Bots?

So spammers have your address. Sorry, not much you can do about that. What you can do is to keep future spammers from finding your email address. Some of these are easy and some are pretty advanced techniques. Unfortunately, some of the are becoming obsolete as spammers are also getting more advanced.

Here is one solution with JavaScript that is simple and effective. A free web tool called Email Protector, which encrypts your email address and spits out a string of code that a web designer can use instead of a “mailto:” link.

When a user clicks on the link, the JavaScript works behind the scenes and decrypts the address and turns it into the correct “mailto:” link. You will also need to download a small JavaScript file here. Put that file in your HTML directory on your site. Insert the snippet of code that generated from the Email Protector site.

In your new contact link, make sure the link isn’t your email address, but something like “Contact Me”.

Hopefully this will help curb your email spam over time. There will always be annoying spam harvesting bots out there trying to suck up your address. No matter how strong your security is, the best thing that you can always do is this: Beware.

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