Article: Protecting Your Inbox

continued from Page 1

 

Encode your email!

One of the best and most fail safe methods of protecting your email is to encode it in a way in which email harvesters can't read it at all. The code looks like complete numerical gibberish, but displays normally on web pages. For example, the email "yourusername@mail.com" would come out as this:

yourus
ername
@mail.
com

You would then replace the part of your <a href></a> tag where the address goes with it. For example:

<a href="mailto:&#121;&#111;&#117;&#114;&#117;
&#115;&#101;&#114;&#110;&#097;&#109;&#101;
&#064;&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#046;
&#099;&#111;&#109;">&#121;&#111;&#117;
&#114;&#117;&#115;&#101;&#114;&#110;&#097;
&#109;&#101;&#064;&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;
&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;</a>

Like I said, it looks like gibberish, but trust me-- when you paste it into the html of your site like this, it will still display normally as yourusername@mail.com on your web page. Don't believe me? Then check out the source code if you don't! ;-)

If you need the place of a good online email encoder, you can visit this site or the side bar [>>], where a number of encoders have been listed.

And yes, it really works! 
 

One last tip...

The best way to protect your inbox is to use a combination of these techniques-- of encoding an email address that has also been stuffed with an additional word. However, even using one of these methods will be enough to take care of a spam problem, or at least temporarily flow the number of spam you get each day. So make sure you do use one of them, lest you want to be assailed by Longer, Harder, Faster spam flooding your inbox!
 
 

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