I would like to post e-mail addresses on my site so that a real human being can click to send an e-mail, but the e-mail address would be obscured from web crawlers. I am thinking about writing a script to assemble the e-mail address when a person clicks. My thought is that the e-mail address would be there but broken up - kind of like somone putting their e-mail address on a newsgroup in a way that a webcrawler would miss - like "myname at domain dot com" rather than myname@domain.com. I hate forms and would not like to force people to use a form as some large websites do.

TIA,

Rob

An script like you were saying would work, or i've even heard about people "scrambling" email addresses to deter crawlers from finding them.

http://www.hotscripts.com/cgi-bin/recommend_it.cgi?ID=26614

check that link out...

Josh, thanks for the reply. While a programmer, I am new to scripting. The link looks like a cgi function. Isn't that for server-side scripting? I was envisioning something client-side. Perhaps compatibility is an issue. Do you have to choose between Java and VB Script? I hate to show my ignorance, but that is why I am here - to learn enough to protect myself.

Thanks again,

Rob

PS: If I can figure this out, I would be willing to post the solution here. I would think other would like to use it. Don't know if we can stay ahead of the spammers though...

I downloaded the program that Josh linked to, called iScramble, and it looks like a very nice solution. It's a PHP function that you'd have to run from www.smarterlinux.com (HostMySite.com's Windows servers don't support PHP), and it does exactly what you requested. Since it's server-side, no one browsing your website will need to have any software installed to make it work.

If you need the same solution in a Windows environment, there should be a way to do it in ASP (or ASP.net, or even CF for that matter), however I'm not aware of it.

I have seen some for ASP and ASP.NET - I can research them alittle more and post links. otherwise if you get ahold of the PHP script itself, you can just mimick what it does in ASP/ASP.NET to accomplish the same thing.

Here is a technique I use to (hopefully) fool the crawlers/spammers from determining the real email address:

I convert the key portions of the email address (those starting with the '@' sign) to their escape equivalent. For convenience, I create an ASP global variable that I then use throughout the site.

For example: create a variable called g_sAtMydomainDotCom and assign it the following (replacing Mydomain with whatever your domain is)

NOTE: In order to view the following sample, you need to VIEW -> SOURCE on this message since the const literal is actual made up of escape characters!



Then in your ASP code, use the following



The resulting html produced by the ASP will contain all the escape characters and the spider/crawlers/spammers will (hopefully) perceive that as standard text, not part of an email address.

If you are using straight html, just use the escape characters directly in the mailto: tag.

Good luck!

Good Tip!!!

There are also some basic scramblers available where coding is not needed for html pages. I have one found thru macromedia that scrambles email addresses into chanacters like &#109, &#107, etc. An example of an email address would be On this one also you will need to view the source of the page to see what it is doing. This one is called Encoded Email Link and was found in the developers exchange on Macromedia's site.
There are javascripts available that will scramble email addresses also, including ones that change the text to ASCII.