Avoiding email address harvesting

When displaying an email address on a web page, it is important to hide or encrypt it in some way in order to prevent your email from being harvested. Email addresses are sought after by 'spammers' who use various programs to search the Internet and harvest email addresses, which are then sent unsolicited mail (spam). There are various ways to encrypt an email address; we make use of two:

Encoding the address

Example: Let's take a fictional email address - someone@somewhere.com
By exchanging the letters for their numerical equivalents, you can encrypt the address, but when viewed in a browser it will appear unchanged.

character	code	character	code	character	code
a	a	j	j	s	s
b	b	k	k	t	t
c	c	l	l	u	u
d	d	m	m	v	v
e	e	n	n	w	w
f	f	o	o	x	x
g	g	p	p	y	y
h	h	q	q	z	z
i	i	r	r	@	@

Using the above table to convert the email address, it will appear as: someone@somewhere.com

A JavaScript solution splits the email name and the domain name - the following script needs to be edited to suit you and inserted where you want the email address to show:

<script language="JavaScript"></script>

Of course neither of these is foolproof and we will frequently review the best method to avoid spam and update our guidelines accordingly.