Webloggin » Tech Tip - Protecting E-Mail Addresses from Spam Bots, Spiders, and Spoofers

One method that spammers use to cull e-mail addresses from websites is by programatically parsing your web pages looking for e-mail addresses withing your posts and site code. It’s a form of screen scraping that is pretty simple from a conceptual point of view. Basically these bots read your site looking for e-mail addresses, sending them back to whoever is collecting them.

As simple as this process is it’s relatively easy to to circumvent these automated collectors without resorting to the annoying emailme-AT-someaddress.com lookup method. It’s called munging in technical slang. Basically munging is simply computer speak for encoding. Wordpress can actually do this for you automatically with special php calls but that isn’t as easy as the methods at http://www.addressmunger.com/.

At address munger you can enter in your e-mail address and it will generate code that is designed to hide the address in your HTML code while displaying it in human readable form on your website. I personally prefer the simple ascii munge because it is the easiest to insert on your site without fancy javascript or images, but to each his own. Give it a try and insert the code into your sidebars or a post. Just make sure you insert it as html code and not rich text.

This method isn’t perfect. Sophisticated bots can search for this special text but there are many ways to generate special code. Javascript methods and images work as well. This is just one tool in the arsenal of weapons you can use to circumvent spammers.

Give it a spin for yourself. There is an option to preview what the links will look like when inserted on your site. You can view the results for yourself and see this in action by searching for editor@webloggin.com in the source of this page.