Publishing an email address - but not to spammers

[ffutures]

Since my email address will be changing soon, I'm going to have to put the new contact details on my web site (which reminds me I need to change my address with the hosting company, nominet, nominet UK, etc.)

I want to make it as difficult as possible for spammers to use automated spiders to grab my email address from the site - I think last time I put in some tabs between letters and otherwise obfuscated things.

Any suggestions on ways of doing this?

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

My suggestion would be to not bother. It makes it harder for real people to contact you, and the best way to avoid spam is good filters (or use Gmail). I work with many websites, have the address out in plain site, and spam very, very rarely gets through Gmail's filters (one or two every few months).

[dandello.livejournal.com]

Seriously, the javascript solution really is a good one. I've have a lot of stuff get through filters.
And for more serious security, a contact form. The bot can't even get to your email address without first jumping through hoops.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

A lot of 'bots can use contact forms (indeed any sort of HTML form is easy to program a 'bot' to hit send buttons). Of course, you can then load it using JS and have CAPTCHAs, but that then pisses off the users.

Like with a lot of other 'security' it doesn't stop the maldoers but does piss off the honest users. As far as I can see the best way is to let the text be visible but not machine-readable, but using either a picture (which is unfriendly to poor-sighted people) or to have things like keristor AT gmail DOT com.

Or not bother. The amount of spam which I can attribute to my website (which has the address in clear and links) is very small, almost all of it is based on usernames at my known domains (easy enough to get from DNS) which don't actually exist.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've gone with the javascript - it lets people see and copy the address, or click on it to open their email program, it just isn't readily readable if you look at the raw code.