If you display your email address on a webpage, there is good likelihood that spambots scouring the web will find it and harvest the email address. Spammers gather this list of emails to send spam or to sell the list to other spammers. To see what I mean, read the article "Win the SPAM Arms Race".
To their email address from spambots, many people use a contact form instead of displaying an email address on the webpage. However, there are some disadvantages to using a contact form. In particular the sender can always put in a fake "from email address" or another person's email address so you can never be sure of the validity of the sender's email address. Contact form has its own problems such as form hijacking where spammer hack your contact form to send spam to other people. In addition, some visitors do not like them and would rather have a real email address that they can type into their email client.
But this article is not able the disadvantages of contact form. It is for those who DO want to display their email address to human readers but want techniques to protect email address from being harvested by spambots. Here are some ways for doing it...
Use Javascript to dynamically write out the email address during page load. Spambots that are not smart enough to understand Javascript will be foiled. Here is a tutorial for doing this...
Similarly spambots that does understand character entities or are too lazy to decode them will not bother harvesting your address. Here is a tutorial for doing such...
Note that no technique is fool-proof. Sufficient intelligent spambot can potentially decode both forms of your obfuscated email address. Other highly intelligent software such as the Google's search engine robot (Googlebot) have been suspected for knowing about these technique and may be able to figure out what is being encoded. But you don't have to worry about the Google search engine, it is not in the business or collecting your email for spamming.
