Saturday, October 6, 2007

How to Hide E-mail Address From the Spiders and Spambots?

Wanna hide your e-mail address in your blog or website from the spiders and spambots? Then do follow ways discussed here to prevent these culprits to harvest your e-mail address.

The common methods for preventing the spambot to harvest your email are : -

1. Modifying the e-mail Text
2. Using "Alias" for e-mail addresses
3. Adding Some More Text to Email Addresses

Just write your email addresses in non-email format for hiding the same from the spam bots and spiders, but only human readers can read it. You can write your email id in different format as "yourID at yourdomain dot com".

You can easily fool the spambots once you provided the email address as above.

Drawbacks of Modifying E-mail ID

The main drawback of writing email in this format is that most of the users won't believe it as your email address, as it is in different format. In addition to this the users prefer to go for user-friendly e-mail address format. i.e.

Most of the visitors do want to click the e-mail ID in your blog/website to open their email client to send the emails.Unfortunately some of the spambots still able to crack your email ID in this format.

If you use alias in the recipient field, you can prevent the spider or spam bot to capture your e-mail ID. Once you use alias in the recipient field, the email address is invisible to both spambot and spiders.

Instead of writing your e-mail ID as yourid@yourdomain.com, you can write as yourid@antispam_yourdomain.com. You should give necessary instruction to the user to neglect the term- "antispam_" for using your e-mail.

This method also fools the spiders from collecting the emails from your blog/website. Moreover, you cannot expect all the readers to read the instruction below on your e-mail ID. They will simply copy the e-mail and address and paste it in their address column of the email.

This method is not user-friendly because most of the users would like to click the link in your e-mail ID to send a message to you...

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