Do you want to help keep your free web mail from the hands of spammers? One technique that spammers gather email addresses would be to “mine” web pages, which are public. They have robot software that search through every website they could find, searching for patterns such as:
email to louie@hotmailemail.com
When they find a match, they add it to their list of possible new email addresses.
A technique to combat this is to scramble the email addresses on your website pages (your own, plus other people’s email address that you mention), so that browsers can show the email address, but robot software will miss it.
A typical and noticeable technique is to insert spaces in your email address:
l o u i e @ h o t ma i l e m a i l . c o m
Another strategy is to quit using MAILTO links, because they are an obvious indication that what follows is an email address:
<a href=”mailto:louie@hotmailemail.com”>Email me</a>
Removing the Mailto link is not as much of a loss as you may think, since most people do not have their browsers configured properly to do email links. A less common, more foolproof, and much more troublesome method is to convert the email address into a GIF graphic file.
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