Commonly known as “spam bots” or “e-mail harvesters”, a technology used by those people who wish to scan your source-code for any unsuspecting owner’s e-mail address, their harvesting method can be avoided ef we don’t actually type the address into the code in the form it would take if we were typing it into the To: field of an e-mail composition.

How then can we possibly display the address so that our web site visitors can know where to send mail in order to contact us via e-mail?

Display the address as an image! If your graphics / photo / image editing software allows for text manipulation, then all you need to do is type out your address as part of an image– you’ll probably want to do that as black-text on a white-background, or at least match to text and background colors of your web site style. Crop the text part of the image so that it is just as high as one line of text, and place that image, inline where you want to display your e-mail address.

A visitor will now be able see your address– even though there is no source-code to be scanned by a “spam-bot” which would disclose your private information. This is one of the more secure methods of displaying an e-mail address for public viewing.

There are other options as well for displaying a secure, readable e-mail address, such as the JavaScript “unspamable” e-mail link which uses variables to represent the address in the source code.