Protect Email on Web Site From Robots and Crawlers

Question

Closed as duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/308772/what-are-some-ways-to-protect-emails-on-websites-from-spambots

I am finally puting up my personal web site. I want to publish a webmaster/feedback email on every page, but I am concerned about SPAM crawlers extracting the email address and bombarding me. This is especially true because I can't use my normal whitelist oriented filtering in this case. Are there effective ways to communicate an email address to people which are hard for crawlers to extract?

My long term plan is to allow feedback via posted forms (and then I will have questions about captcha for y'all), but I don't have time for that now (it's not an immediate priority), and I don't want to go live with no means of feedback at all.

Answer 1

See this Stackoverflow thread

I'm partial to using javascript to construct the mailto URL on the client side.

Answer 2

when you get to the forms perspective then look at something free like recaptcha.net

As for now, simply obfuscating the email address in some form should help. I would consider the common [my email (AT) some domain dot com] type of writeout. You could also add another layer of defense by doing that in an email using various fonts and sizes and other effects to beat very sophisticated crawlers with OCR abilities

Answer 3

Some alternatives to the JavaScript method.

Spell out your address and avoid making it a link. Example: someone (at) somewhere (dot) com.

HTML encode the email address in the href attribute and inside the anchor tag.