How can I protect my site/email against spam?

Email addresses that are present in the site, can be gathered by an email harvester: a malicious script made by spammers visiting sites and searching for email addresses on them, which are then entered in their database.

But those "bots" can only read data that is readily present as text. Therefore, the solution is to let a client-side script (javascript) generate the emailaddress.

So first make an HTML container where your emailaddress will appear.

<p id="email">Sorry, you can't see my email address because your browser does not support the script that is a safety matter against spam crawlers looking for email addresses.</p>

Then add a function that changes the content of this container.

function mailProtect(){ var firstname = "yourname"; var mailaddress= firstname + "@yourdomain.com"; document.getElementById('email').innerHTML="To contact me, send an email to: <a href='mailto:"+ mailaddress +"'>"+ mailaddress +"</a>"; }

To finish it off, call that function when the page is loaded:

window.onload = function(){mailProtect();}

To see the script in action, click here.

The described method is not entirely foolproof. No, the visiting scripts can NOT grab email addresses that are produced by client-side scripts, but humans can! Yes, some spam companies do pay people (a little) to manually search for emailaddresses, thus they can also 'grab' the generated result, visible on the screen...

By the way, methods that also don't work are:

• showing an image of your emailaddress, as some scripts can also read images... (that's why CAPTCHA images often look so scrambled)
• changing the emailaddress a little, in such a matter that is apparent to humans how to change the text to make it work (e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com becomes yourname_at_yourdomain_dot_com), but that's not very "usable" too.

In fact, nothing works... but everything may help.

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