Displaying Your eMail Safely

We all want our readers to be able to contact us. What we don't want are robots that crawl websites harvesting email addresses to add to spam lists finding us. Most people just post their email address by breaking it up. Usually, it will look something like: myemailaddress [at] someserver [dot] com. But then, if someone wants to email you, they've got to type that in manually, there could be spelling mistakes, and it's a bit of a pain. If you have access to HTML on your blog, you can copy the following script and use it to make your email available at the click of the button!



Now to be fair, it's not foolproof, but it would take a more sophisticated bot to farm your address from this than if you just wrote it out. Since it uses javascript, the bot would have to be java enabled. (Technically, a java-enabled bot could be tricked into an infinite loop, crashing spammer servers, so for efficiency I don't think there would be many out there.) I'm updating this article, because in the many months that I've been using this script, I haven't gotten spam. Imagine that.

You'll have to edit the line "emailE=..." for your own address...

• Change "npluspluswargaming" to the start of your own email address.
• Leave the "@"
• Change the "gm" and "ail" to whatever your server is, but split up.. for example: 'ya' + 'hoo' or 'hotm' + 'ail'
• Leave the "."
• Change the "c" and the "om" to whatever your domain suffix is... for example: 'n' + 'et' or 'or' + 'g'

If you like, you can change the words "email me" to whatever you like, even replacing them with an image tag pointing to a picture you'd like to use.



<script type="text/javascript">
<!-- // protected email script by Joe Maller // JavaScripts available at http://www.joemaller.com // this script is free to use and distribute // but please credit me and/or link to my site // Modified by Dave G for added obscurity

emailE=('npluspluswargaming' + '@' + 'gm' + 'ail' + '.' + 'c' + 'om')
document.write('<A hr' + 'ef="mai' + 'lto:' + emailE + '">Email Me</a>')

//-->
</script>

<noscript>
<em>eMail protected by JavaScript</em>
</noscript>


*DISCLAIMER* This doesn't prevent spam from people who go out of their way to send you an email, add you to an email list, or if you give your email out when signing up for a service and they sell off your email. I get maybe 1 scam spam email every month or two, and it always seems to be tailored at me. Gmail's built-in spam block always catches it though.

To avoid spam from services you sign up for, get another email account and only use it for signing up with websites. There are plenty of free email options like GMail or Hotmail... or spend the $10/year and get your own domain name - then you can create a whole bunch of extra email addresses.