Spammers can harvest email addresses by programming their computers to look for “@” signs on web pages. If you use an editor that inserts a mail-to link using html code, then you have left an “@” sign in your page’s source code which is harvestable. To keep your email address invisible to spammers’ computers, put your email address into a small image, in other words, an icon, which you can place on your page. Why does this keep your address invisible to computers? Because the text appearing in an image cannot be scanned by web crawlers (the computers that search web pages).
But, how to create such an icon? Well, you could use an image editor, like GIMP or Photoshop; or—a much easier solution– you could use nexodyne.com’s web page to quickly generate an icon. Here’s how that page works:
First you enter your email user name, then in a drop-down menu you indicate your mail service, such as Gmail, Netscape, Hotmail, etc.
Then you click on the “Generate” button, which creates an icon with the text entries you have set. The icon is stored on the Nexodyne.com server and you receive a url to the icon, which you can then insert in the html code of your web page. Or, you can opt to download the icon to your own computer.
The icon at top left is one which I generated using the nexodyne.com page.
A reader emailed me to let me know that there’s another way to approach this problem which he likes better, because it leaves the email address clickable. See the explanation at: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html