Have you ever wondered why you suddenly started getting tons of spam?
Do you have, or did you recently post your email address on a website?
Then the reason is probably because you did not properly protect the email address, and spammers get most email addresses from robot script that harvest email addresses from websites. It is pretty simple really. The robot script hits the largest search engines for certain key words or phrases, to help the spammer hit the most relevent email addresses, and then systematically follows the links to websites. Once the robot gets to the website it then searches all links on the page. Each link it finds on the page that is a “mailto:” is an email address, and in a matter of minutes a robot script can harvest hundreds of emails.
So now you are asking, “What can be done to protect me from these vile robots?”. Well that answer is also simple. Most robot script are not smart enough, yet, to search Javascript code that scrambles an email address and form it back into a valid email address. So here is how to do it:
First, you need to go into the HTML code and insert the Javascript as follows:
var theuser = "username" // change this to be the username, or portion of the email to the left of the @
var thehost = "your-domain.com" // change this to be your domain name
var themessage = theuser + "@" + thehost;
// Now we tell Javascript to bring the pieces of the email address together visually on the screen as a link
document.write("" + themessage + "")
Note: Be sure to substitute username and your-domain.com with your own information.
Now when you view your webpage in your favorite browser (Firefox) you will see the email as a link like you wanted, and the robots will see a bunch of code that most of them cannot form into a valid email address.