"Spambots" are programs that search through web pages looking for email addresses. These addresses are then sold to spammers, who proceed to fill your inbox with junk!
You can protect yourself from spambots through obfuscation: the idea is to mangle your email address just enough to confuse spambots, but not enough to cause significant confusion for humans. (This task will grow more difficult as computers get smarter.)
Some people publish their address in image form instead of
text. This method will foil most spambots, but
download times become longer, mailto: links
are not possible, and the address becomes inaccessible to people
using browsers that don't support images (such as the blind, who
use screen-reading software).
Another solution is to disguise the address, or make it
trivially invalid. For example, user@example.com
could be written as user at example dot com or
user@example.remove-this-part.com. These
disguised addresses are still accessible to humans, though
mailto: links are still not possible.
Using a script embedded in the web
page, some web browsers can automatically display disguised
addresses as valid mailto: links.
Our website templates provide one such solution.
If you are using the
department templates you can embed disguised
addresses in your web pages, and a script will rewrite them
for your viewers. Use the <span> tag, like
so:
<span class="eaddr"> user at example dot com </span>
When viewed in a Javascript-capable web browser, this text will be rewritten to appear as user@example.com
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