Copyright (C) Richard Lowe Jr. and Claudia Arevalo-Lowe,
1999-2001.
In many instances you will want to put your email address on
your website, even if you provide a form as a contact method. This is useful
because it increases the number of ways that someone can contact you. Why is
that important? Because presumably if you have a website you are attempting to
communicate with the world - and communication goes both ways. If you have a
commercial site then the answer should be obvious - someone may want to
purchase something.
Another reason to put an email address directly on your web
page is for people to request information via auto responder. These allow your
visitors to click a simple mailto link and get your promotional materials or
articles in their email inbox.
The problem with directly including your email addresses on
your pageis spam harvesters. These a programs created by scum and run by
ignorant or unethical fools. What they do is search through the internet,
looking at web sites and pages for email addresses to add to those million
email address collections that you see advertised (mostly in spam) all over
the place.
There is really no ironclad way to prevent these
bottom-feeders from scanning your web site for email addresses. There are a
number of techniques, however, to make it a little more difficult for them.
One of these is to code your email addresses in something called
Unicode. This is a "language" for encoding special
characters on web pages. All modern browsers support Unicode as it's primary
intention is to allow languages all over the planet to be represented. For
example, the following email address:
webmaster@internet-tips.net
will be shown in Unicode as:
webmaster
@internet
-tips.net
As you can see from the table below, using Unicode
characters is simple. Just substitute the Unicode sequence in the table for
the corresponding character. Then use all of those sequences wherever you want
to put that email address.
|
@
|
@
|
E
|
E
|
M
|
M
|
U
|
U
|
c
|
c
|
k
|
k
|
s
|
s
|
|
.
|
.
|
F
|
F
|
N
|
N
|
V
|
V
|
d
|
d
|
l
|
l
|
t
|
t
|
|
-
|
-
|
G
|
G
|
O
|
O
|
W
|
W
|
e
|
e
|
m
|
m
|
u
|
u
|
|
_
|
_
|
H
|
H
|
P
|
P
|
X
|
X
|
f
|
f
|
n
|
n
|
v
|
v
|
|
A
|
A
|
I
|
I
|
Q
|
Q
|
Y
|
Y
|
g
|
g
|
o
|
o
|
w
|
w
|
|
B
|
B
|
J
|
J
|
R
|
R
|
Z
|
Z
|
h
|
h
|
p
|
p
|
x
|
x
|
|
C
|
C
|
K
|
K
|
S
|
S
|
a
|
a
|
i
|
i
|
q
|
q
|
y
|
y
|
|
D
|
D
|
L
|
L
|
T
|
T
|
b
|
b
|
j
|
j
|
r
|
r
|
z
|
z
|
I suppose it is inevitable that the scum spammers will
eventually make their spam robots smart enough to understand these codes.
Until then, however, it is a reasonably effective technique for reducing spam
in your inbox.
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