Alpaca Graphics'

ANTI-SPAM EMAIL ENCODER
  This form will allow you to encode your e-mail address through the use of Character Entities, transforming your ascii email address into its equivalent decimal code.

Enter your E-mail Address:

Your Encoded E-mail Address:


INSTRUCTIONS:
 1) Enter your e-mail address. (Note you will have to put: 'mailto:' up front of the actual address to use it as the actual link. As in 'mailto:you@your.com' .)
2) Click on the 'Encode Your E-mail Address' Button.
3) Completely highlight and copy the resulting encoded address.
4) Paste that code into the webpage code anywhere you find your e-mail address.
No extra spaces, quote marks, semi-colons, etc. are needed.
The code is an EXACT replacement for the actual e-mail address placed in HTML code.

What will happen?:
Your browser screen will show your normal e-mail address, but in it's place in the code it will contain: ....64;do&#10.... But it works just as good.
Spammer robots scan the internet websites looking for the "@" sign. For now they aren't looking for it's decimal equivalent (&#064). When they find the '@' they simply 'develop' the actual e-mail address from the characters around it using spaces and the period as delimiters.
Other methods of 'hiding' the @ sign include a simplier method by replacing only the '@' sign with &#064 .
For example:
On the visible web page you see: yourname@domain.com
In the source code for the web page, the above should look like this: yourname&#064domain.com
This technique is not by any means a foolproof method of ending spam from your website but it will be a good start.
There is yet a widlely used spammer robot that can decipher the decimal code to gather email addresses.
Another simple method is using JavaScript to 'develop' the e-mail address without having the '@' sign amongst the other parts of the e-mail address.
This is probably the most foolproof method because the actual JavaScript code can be changed slightly from any other similar scripts on the internet. This making it virtually impossible for a spam-bots to 'develop' the email address even if the '@' sign is visible in the code.
CAPTCHA
Using CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.") is a well used method to prevent auto-filling (and sending) online forms.

  

Example:

The non-encoded code: <a href="mailto:you@yours.com">you@yours.com</a>

But when you encode it, the source code would look like:

<a href="mailto:&#121;&#111;&#117;&#064;&#121;&#111;&#117;&#114;&#115;&

#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;">#121;&#111;&#117;&#064;&#121;&#111;&#117;&#

114;&#115;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;/a>

and (in either case) the result would be: you@yours.com

 

There are some really fool-proof methods to make it very difficult for the spam robots to gather addresses.

Actually it's a pet-peeve of mine.. I create websites that are anti-spam.  They virtually need a human to decypher the code to reconstruct the email addresses.    -Ron

  
  Hey, Thanks Mike Y. !