Ask Michel Komarov

Bad guys scan the web in looking for email addresses for their spam bases.
Their bot-scripts can detect your email address when you place it at a web-page.

Now what? Do you give the email address to your visitors?
You can protect your address at your web-pages.

In the previous post we used unicode encoding to cloak a Return URL of your order form. The same encoding will help us to protect email address from most of scanning scripts.

The simplest way to detect an email address is to scan a page on the <a href="mailto:..."> signature. So we have to encode this value like below.
<a href="&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#58;...">

Web-browsers understand this encoding and would show this as a regular link to email. And when you place a code like this:

<a href="&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#58;&#109;&#105;
&#99;&#104;&#101;&#108;&#64;&#105;&#99;&#111;&#100;&#101;&#114;
&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;" > &#109;&#105;&#99;&#104;&#101;&#108;
&#64;&#105;&#99;&#111;&#100;&#101;&#114;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;
</a>

You’ll get a regular email-link:

 
michel@icoder.com
 

 
Now the form to encode your email.

Email-encoding Generating Form

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Related Articles:

• Comprehensive Feedback Form with Attachments
• How to hide the Return URL of your order form

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 05:34 and is filed under Plug-in Scripts, Sales Pages, HTML Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.