Hide Your Email Address from Spammers
The Short Version
When you write your email address on the web, use HTML character entities to obscure it so spammers don't find it.
Do NOT write this:
<a href="mailto:help@stat.duke.edu">help@stat.duke.edu</a>
DO write this:
<a href="mailto:help@stat.duke.edu">help@stat.duke.edu</a>
If that's too confusing, it might be sufficient to obscure just the
“m” in mailto:
and the “@” sign:
<a href="mailto:help@stat.duke.edu">help@stat.duke.edu</a>
The Long Version
One of the most popular methods that spammers use to gather email addresses
is harvesting them from web pages. They use automated tools that crawl
the web looking for mailto:
links and “@” signs.
There are many countermeasures for this method, such as using an image for
your email address or spelling it phonetically (e.g. vangyzen at stat
dot duke dot edu). One such method is to use HTML
character entities
to “encode” your email address, making it unrecognizable by
harvesters but still legible by humans. Character entities are
primarily used to represent characters which don't appear on some
keyboards — such as €, £, ß, ü, ç, ñ,
and é — or which don't appear on any keyboard —
such as ¢, §, ¶, æ, and ©. They are written with
a special &name;
syntax. For example, the Euro symbol
is written €
and the correct Latin spelling of
“Vitæ” is written Vitæ
.
Character entities can also be used to write normal characters — instead
of a name, just write a “#” followed by the ASCII code for the
character. For example, the “@” sign can be written
@
and mailto:
can be written
mailto:
.
More Fun with HTML Character Entities
Use character entities to write Greek!
Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω
α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω
Just write:
Α Β Γ ...
α β γ ...
Many browsers — including Firefox — even support some mathematical symbols:
∀ ∃ ∅ ∈ ∉ ∑ ∏ √ ∫ ∞
Annotate a bridge match!
♠ ♣ ♥ ♦
For details, see the HTML source of this page and the relevant section of the W3C's Formal HTML Specification.