Protect your email address from SPAM

I always recommend that you put your contact details clearly on your website.

This is a matter of courtesy to your visitors. It also helps establish you as a credible supplier by making it clear who they are dealing with.

After all, what do you think when you find a website that seems interesting but has no information on the company behind it?

However, there is a downside. Your contact details are also visible to Spammers. In particular your email address can be 'harvested' by programs specifically designed to collect such information in order to sell them to mass merchandisers for spam email campaigns. All these programs have to do is search for an @ in a suitable format.

Now I have found a solution for which I am indebted to a guy called Steve Peterson Sr.

For full details, go to:

http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/adv_tech/spam-proof.htm

In essence, he suggests replacing the @ symbol with Unicode so that the appearance to human visitors is not changed but programs looking for @ will not find it.

I have made the change on my site already. It does not end all spam; but hopefully, as from now, I won't find myself on so many new lists.

Try it yourself. For minimum effort, you could save yourself a lot of hassle.

Regards

Stephen Orr