Keep spam at bay

Your email address is a valuable commodity, and you should treat it accordingly. Posting your address on a public site (such as on the contact page of your blog or web site) makes it easy for every spammer in this solar system to scrape your email off the page and start sending you junk. But you still want customers, partners and clients to be able to reach you. What to do?

Actually, there a number of easy strategies you can employ to keep yourself available to people who need to reach you without opening yourself up to spammers. The important thing to remember is that you need to make it easy for humans to find you but hard for bots to harvest your email automatically. Here are some common techniques:

Break up your email. Rather than printing your email address in a way that's easy to copy, like fakeemail@fakedomain.com, replace the @ and the period with words, as in fakeemail at fakedomain dot com.

Use an image. Bots -- so far -- aren't very good at interpreting images, so you can insert an image of your email address on the page instead of using text. It's easy to do: In any photo editing program, use the text tool to type your email address. Crop the image tightly around the text and then save it as a JPG.

Use a contact form. Rather than providing the email address directly on the page, use a contact form that sends a message to you without ever revealing the actual address. Yes, it can be annoying to have to enter text in a web page rather than sending mail in your own mail program, but this is a highly effective way to limit email harvesting.

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