If you run a website one thing that will probably affect you is spam email and lots of it! At the time of writing this article I proabably get in the region of about 50-100 pieces of spam mail everyday in my website inbox.

Basically if you have your email address printed somewhere on your site when a spambot come along and finds it is will start spamming that email address.

There are various ways round it you can use a form instead that hides your email address like I have on my contact page – contact peazyshop. One of the things I don’t like about contact forms is that it is good to have the email address printed somewhere on the website too I think it makes it more personal.

So to get round that you can code your email address in ASCII so that a spam bot doesn’t recognise it. If you go to http://linuxtech.com/www-email.html there is a form at the bottom that codes email addresses so that spambots can’t use them but we can still see them. All you need to do is paste the code in where you would normally have your email address printed.

Another option to cut down on spam is to have your email address written in an image so that we can read it but a spam bot can’t, but this is not helpful if you are blind as a text reader will not be able read your address either and if you are running a business online is illegal too! More infomation on the Disibility Discrimination Act

Another option is to use javascript to hide your email there is an example of how to do it at this site http://www.joemaller.com/js-mailer.shtml but again you need to presume most people have javascript enabled on their browser, most people do but some don’t.