Since robots and spiders routinely search the Web for e-mail addresses,
Web site owners need to take steps to protect their addresses. If
your e-mail address appears on your Web site, it can be vacuumed up by
Web spiders or spam bots, and you'll get more and more junk mail as time
marches on.
Once
your address is "in the system," the only way to stop mail to
a particular address is to stop using it. If you can't bear to part with
your perfect e-mail address, your next best option is to install a good
antispam program* that will drop most of the junk mail to this address
into a special folder when you download your messages. As time allows, you
can quickly scan this junk mail folder for any legitimate messages that
might have slipped through and then dump them. I used to get only a few
junk messages a day, but the quantity is now up to 200 a day and
climbing. (Some businesses in my network report they are receiving two or
three thousand messages a day, so this clearly is a problem that can't
be ignored.)
If
you lack the technical ability to hide your e-mail address on your Web
site through the use of CGI or JavaScript, you can use one of the free
e-mail encoders on the Web to turn your address into simple HTML code
that will look like gibberish to spam bots. (Supposedly, this code can't
be read by Web robots, but there are no guarantees since the robots
aren't likely to stay dumb forever.) You
just type your e-mail address into the encoder and it gives you HTML
code to strip into your site. Mine looks like this:
<A
HREF="mailto:barbara@barbarabrabec.com">
barbara@barbarabrabec.com</a>
I use this
encoder now, but you can find others on the Web simply by typing
"email encoder" into your browser's search window.
See also related article, Handling Spam
Spoofers, (what to do when someone steals your e-mail address or URL
to send junk or pornographic mail).
