E-Mail Encode

In a series of experiements, the Center for Democracy and Technology created dozens of new e-mail addresses and then used them in various ways to see which addresses would receive the most spam. After months of public exposure, the e-mail addresses that received almost all -- 97 percent -- of the thousands of pieces of spam that came in were those posted to web pages. Addresses that had been used only to register at e-commerce sites, for example, received little or no spam.

The Problem

Posting your e-mail address on a web site is a sure-fire way to get an Inbox full of unsolicited email advertisements. Professional spammers constantly scan the Internet using high-speed programs known as harvesters to capture visible e-mail addresses. Harvesting e-mail addresses in this way is illegal in the U.S. under the CAN-SPAM Act, but that hasn't stopped the practice.

The Fix

The E-Mail Encode tool protects email addresses by encoding HTML characters using the entity syntax for that particular character. For example abc would encode to abc. The idea is to encode the text so it is no longer plain text, making it more diffictult for a harvester to read, but it can be easilly decoded by the browser. This technique eliminates the mailto: URL that most harvesters look for.

Although ASCII or JavaScript Encoding increases the level of protection an email address receives on your web site, neither type can guarantee complete immunity against the increasingly sophisticated programming of modern harvesters to decode these techniques.

The Form

E-Mail Address:
Link Text:



The box below contains the JavaScript code block to copy and paste into the HTML source of the web site you are creating, in exactly the place where you would like the address to appear. Then view the page in a web browser, and you will see the link appear.

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