Best Method For Foiling Email Harvesters?

pjp6259 writes "One of the common ways that spammers generate email mailing lists is by harvesting email addressess from websites. But in many cases you also need to make it easy for your customers to reach you. I have found three common solutions to this problem: 1.) Use an image to replace your email address. 2.) Use ascii encodings for some/all of the characters. 3.) Use javascript to concatenate and/or obfuscate your email address. Which of these methods are most effective? Are email harvesters able to interpret javascript? What do you use?"

Comments

You can't have your cake an eat it too ...

[un1xl0ser]

If you make it hard for 'bad guys', you make it hard for your customers/friends too. Some people like having mail-to links, and you won't be able to do that easily with an image.

If you have a form to submit to on-line, tag it and let it go to the head of the class.

Re:Make people think to figure out your e-mail

[leonmergen]

Really, if all you want is your customers or prospects be able to reach you through a website, got yourself a contact form.. No way for a harvester to get your email address that way, and people usually don't mind filling in a contact form.. if you obligate your customers to "think" as you suggest, you're risking losing potential custemrs which is simply not worth it. Besides, it makes you look very unprofessional.

Simply put the address in clear text

[Colin Smith]

With a mailto URL and deal with the resulting spam at the mail level, the cost of doing so is less than the cost of alienating potential customers.

However, on a personal site, images.

Re:Make people think to figure out your e-mail

[Ucklak]

You should have a hidden field with no value and make sure it returns no value.
Bots tend to populate all form fields.

That would be the easiest step.
You could go a step further by having a text field that is hidden by a style="display: none;" and make sure that is empty as well.