You know how important it is for your web page visitors to be able to communicate with you, but do you know how to keep your e-mail address safe from web crawling spiders that search out and collect e-mail addresses? No one wants their address harvested and added to a mail spam list! Web spiders locate the @ sign in source code and grab the related text to capture e-mail addresses so to keep your e-mail safe, we have to focus on doing something about that @ sign.

Here are a few ideas to keep those communication lines open and to keep your e-mail address safe.

Spell It Out
Instead of a link, use text to ask people to e-mail you at yourname(at)yourdomain.com, replacing the (at) with the @ sign.

Fool the Spider
If you really like the mailto link, you can fool the web spiders by replacing the @ sign with the hexidecimal equivalent &#064, for example:
”mailto:yourname@yourname.com”

Use a Form
If your web server supports CGI (Common Gateway Interface), set up a form for visitors to contact you. The information entered in the form is processed by the CGI program on the web server and sent to you. I’m using a CGI mail form on my contact page.

If your web server does not support CGI scripts, user or client side programs such as Java Applets or ActiveX can be used. Try a web services site such as Bravenet.com for an easy and free solution to form mail.