Email Masking Techniques
Email addresses placed on Web pages are especially susceptible to the harvesting scripts that spammers use to compile their lists. If you place your address on your Web site, you may become a frequent target for unsolicited mail. Use the following resources to protect your email address and reduce the likelihood of receiving spam.
HTML & 'Human Readable' Forms
There are several ways to disguise your email address from potential harvesting, using either 'human readable' forms or HTML. Your address will remain visible to online visitors, but in most cases it will become unclickable (i.e. no email client will open when the user clicks on it). If you choose one of the techniques below, include a disclaimer on your Web page. Explain that, as part of your anti-spam strategy, you are using 'human readable' forms, which render your email address unclickable. To mask your email address, you can:
- Insert spaces into the address: andreeac @ domain.com
- Write out the whole address instead of using punctuation marks: andreea at domain dot com
- List only your user name and make the domain name available elsewhere on the site: andreeac
- Translate your address into HTML partially or in full. Browsers will still be able to interpret the code, but harvesting scripts will not. In this case, your email address will be clickable. For the ASCII code table, please see <http://www.ascii.cl>: andreeac@domain#46;com
Images & Graphics
In order to have a clickable email address (i.e. one that will open an email client once the user clicks on it) and reduce the address text in your HTML code, you can insert images into your email address. You can represent either the entire address with an image or just the @ sign and the domain. Your address will be safer since harvesting tools cannot detect text in image form.
Note: If you insert Alt tags for images in your HTML code, spammers will be able to detect and harvest the text of your email address.
