Disguise email address on website

[Judith]

How can I disguise/hide my email address on my website so I stop getting so
much spam/junk mail. My website has been online since 1998, several months
ago I put the address it in an image and things were fine for a while but
spam has picked up these past few days (234 overnight). It looks like
someone is using my email address (on my website) to distribute spam and all
the "undeliverable mail" messages come back to me. I use FrontPage 2003 and
will eventually change to Expression Web (when I feel confident enough to
change over).

Thank you.

Judith

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

Judith,
The best way to hide it is to not put it up there at all, usually by
making a contact form that will send an email to you without ever making it
visible. The fact is, the email address harvesters are powerful and
sophisticated and the guys who write them are more and more difficult to
sneak around.

Unfortunately, once your email is picked up, it's going to get sold
to any number of people. All the undeliverable messages you're getting can
be from a virus or bot and don't necessarily have to be from a person.
Sometimes they haven't even harvested your email, they've just created an
algorithm to generate a bogus one that happens to match yours (seems
unlikely, but sometimes it's easier for them to do especially with modern
computers being so powerful they can generate tons of bogus email addresses
in no time). Even posting your mail address into a newsgroup message like
this one will get you tons of spam eventually and once they have your adress
that's it.

 

[Joe Rohn]

Hi Judith,

There are ways that you can "obfuscate" with javascript an email address.
Here's an example:

http://alicorna.com/obfuscator.html

Theses methods may help a little..but they are not foolproof and will not
help reduce any spam to an existing email address after spammers have a hold
of it.

The best way is to process mail through a form on your site that uses server
side coding (like .asp or .php) There are lots of scripts available to do
that depending on what your host supports. Doing it that way your email
address is never directly visible to spammers.

--
Joe
Microsoft MVP FrontPage

Expression and FrontPage Web Forums:
http://www.timeforweb.com/frontpage/forum/default.asp

 

[Judith]

Thank you both for your answers/solutions to my question.

Judith