Stop email robots to get your email address.

SPAM!!!

Everyday I receive some 50 - 100 emails flooding my inbox. I didn't subscribe to their lists and i don't want to recieve them.

You know people use email robots to grab emails on web pages. If you keep a link like webmaster@yourdomain.com, then sure your email will be hacked by email robots.

People search the web for such emails and sell them as safe lists or bulk email lists. You can take few steps to stop your email going in to the hands of spammers.

1. Simple and easy way: Keep your link like
<A HREF="mailto:webmasterATyourdomain.com">Email me</A>
instead of
<A HREF="mailto:webmaster@yourdomain.com">Email me</A>

By this email robots can't grab your email as they can't find '@'. But you have to keep a note for your visitor to change 'AT' to '@' before they give you email.

2. By keeping a mail form: You might have seen on many web sites they keep a contact form instead of just email link. In this form your visitors enters the details and click 'Submit' button. The form content is processed by a cgi script and sent to you.

In this method the form contents should not contain your email address as hidden field. You can get many form processing scripts here.

You can select which you want and install it in your cgi-bin. Put a form on your web site.

3. The Mailto Encoder: If you own a site on the web, you're practically guaranteed to get spammed, right? Here is a small utility that helps you to encode your emails on your web site. How it works: Mailto Encoder introduces codes that spambots will "choke" on, but which a normal mailing program ignores. Therefore people can still send you email but spammers can't get your address!

http://www.emailaddresses.com/mailto_encoder.htm