Sign up for newsletter

The IT Guy

Foil Web Spiders

Question: How can I prevent web spiders from harvesting email addresses on mailto: links and submitting them to databases used by spammers?

The IT Guy says:
Use an online or software tool to create special code for mailto: links on web pages that cannot be harvested by web spiders. Several free online tools are available which create this code. After creating the code, copy and paste it from the browser into your web page authoring software. A more advanced freeware tool for Macintosh OS X users is Spamstopper, which also creates subject tags for mailto links. For Windows users, Email Scrambler has similar functionality but uses javascript and is also free.

Next Tip: Form validation using Dreamweaver

• Sign up for an e-mail newsletter.
• Ask The IT Guy a question or submit your own tip.
• The IT Guy archives

IT Guy Coordinator: Wesley Fryer