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Jim Scott said the following on 07/06/2005 18:15:

> Is there a way to have a button or other link to email me from the website
> without the webcrawlers harvesting me for spam?
> Currently I use a .jpg to display my email address, but of course it does
> not serve as a direct link.

I am on a good commercial host, although I have a private site. Many
services are built into the control panel, and it just takes a few key
clicks to set up many things that are built in. I set up cgi form mail
that is built in. When you select form mail at the control panel, the
required cgi code is written into your cgi bin, and you are given text
instructions, including examples. You just have to modify one of their
standard html pages for the form. You select any pop mail address at
your domain that you wish. When you need a mail link on a page, you
just link to the form page you modified. The domain allows many pop
mail accounts. When the one used for the form mail attracts too much
spam, you just delete it and create a new one that you use on the form
mail page. This only takes about 2 minutes. Server side is the way to
go, if you can. I would discourage most people from writing their own
server side mail script. Even if you can write good code, you will have
to avoid many things that hackers take advantage of. If they can get
in, hackers love Javascript, they like ActiveX even more, and server
side scripts are the best of all. Some of them love to deface pages
with crude images and such. Some have been able to bring a whole server
down - mainly servers of small hosts. Although I will never use the
shopping carts and secure pages offered by my host, it is nice to have
a huge selection of features built in, most at no extra cost. And a
good commercial host often is no more expensive than a small mom and
pop host with very limited features on their server.

Jim Scott mumbled the following on 07/06/2005 18:15:
> Is there a way to have a button or other link to email me from the website
> without the webcrawlers harvesting me for spam?

Despite the server-side options (which I would recommend), there is
another simple tip that I discovered by accident.

Bots seem to strip the @ sign and everything surrounding it upto the
HTML tags surrounding it. If these happen to be the expected <a ...> and
</a> then the bot obviously has your whole address. However, if you're
not 100% fussed about semantic markup, you could use:
<a ...><span>W</span></a>
....and then delete everything sent to "" - the
on-screen display still reads as "Webmaster@...".

Combine this with swapping the @ sign for @, and it should provide
an almost unharvestable address, at least until you get the server-side
script up and running...

--
Gazza
Mobile Number Network Checker - http://mnnc.net/
Creative writing & Poems - http://garyjones.co.uk/
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