Spammers have software programs, often called "spambots", that scan web pages looking for email addresses. Any email address they find, either in the text content of your site, or, more importantly, in your mailto: links, are added to their spam email database. Once your email address winds up in a spammer's database, it can't be removed. Even worse: More often than not, the spammer that finds your email address will sell it to other spammers.
The best way to avoid this problem is to not put any email addresses on your web site. Easier said than done... How will your visitors contact you? One simple way is to add a "Contact Us" form to your site. Some HTML editors, like FrontPage, have an integrated feature that allows you to easily put a "Contact Us" form on your web site. Your visitor fills out the form and clicks the Submit button and the contents of the form are emailed to you. If your HTML editor does not have an integrated forms-to-email capability, look around for one of the many free, easy to use PHP scripts available on the Internet. We like PHP because it works on both Linux and Windows. Next to avoiding email altogether (with a "Contact Us" form), the best solution is to somehow encode your email address to make it harder for spammers to use. That's what the Email Encoder on this page is for.
The encoder does its job by altering your email address so that it's no longer plain text (and easily recognized by a spambot) but still in a form that most browsers understand. The encoding method used it to convert each plan text character into its corresponding HTML character entity. For example abc would encode to abc. This technique eliminates the mailto: URL that most spambots look for.
Although encoding increases the level of protection an email address on your web site has against spambots, it cannot guarantee immunity from spambots. Spammers are increasingly sophisticated. You can assume that some spammers run spambots that understand HTML character entity encoding.
The encoding process on this page is done entirely by JavaScript. Your email address is not sent to our server, so there is now way it can be saved or recorded. This page is not a spammer's sneaky way to gather email addresses for his database!
Hit the Highlight Text button, then right-click over the highlighted text. Select the Copy command, then paste the encoded text in your page's HTML where you want your email address to display. Your encoded email address is formatted to produce the standard "mailto" tag. Here is an example of a standard (non-encoded) mailto tag:
<a href="mailto:your email address">your
email link title here</a>