Whenever you put your email address on a web page, you run the risk of it being “harvested” by the spammers. Their “bots” crawl the web, looking for unprotected email addresses.

In my early years on the web I innocently put numerous email addresses on my web pages. I had to abandon them all because they were being spammed out of sight.

Today, I use a variety of ways to protect myself - often with a bit of Javascript. Last week, whilst looking at a web page, I came across a new technique. It’s a free web-based tool, courtesy of the Carnegie Mellon University. Here’s how it works..

On their web services page (link is below) you enter your email addy, and you’re then given an HTML snippet which you paste into your web page. This displays some text which hides your address, but is still a hyperlink.

When someone hits the hyperlink text, a little window opens up, displaying a “captcha” - an image showing some jumbled up letters.. I’m sure you’ve come across them before. When the user enters the correct letters, they are shown your full email address.

Here’s where to access the service:

http://www.IanSays.com/SpamFighter

I’ve been trying this out on the web version of my newsletter:

http://www.marketing-update-newsletter.com/current.php

It’s a bit of a convoluted method, but it might appeal to you. Incidentally, I suggest that you slightly change the HTML as I have done so that none of your email address is shown.