I've got a simple website that directs people (as most websites do) to send
an email for more information, etc.
But over time, I'm getting more and more spam, and wondered about ideas to
rearrange and rename the emails to combat this. (Sure, I've got anti-spam,
but it only goes so far.)

FIRST, I wondered where the spam-email-gathering "bots" are harvesting the
email from...

Is it primarily just scanning what appears on the face of the website like
"Contact us at info123@XYZcorporation.com?

Or, are the "bots" looking behind the forms where a customer puts his
name/address/email and clicks submit...which causes the 'website' (not the
customer's Outlook) to generate an email to
inquiryfromwebsite@XYZcorporation.com?

SECOND, got any ideas on how to combat this...like turning the email text
into a graphic (can't be harvested), or "Contact us at i n f o @ X Y Z ...
" or telling the customer to "send us an email at info at our company dot
com", or whatever...

Agreed, I'll have to "retire" these current spam-ruined emails and give the
next batch new names...but I'd like to try something different on the newly
named emails so they don't become spam casualties...or at least they last a
little longer than the previous ones.

Thanks for any ideas,
George

First: Certainly such bots are scanning for href tags, but also form
action tags and hidden fields. Not quite sure what you mean by "behind
the forms," though. It's not really possible for a bot to see what the
server is doing with the processed form--not unless your server's been
hacked, of course!

I generally use throw-away e-mails. (For instance, I created my
current address--funny_leech--a couple days ago, and will use it a
month or so.) This is especially useful for forms, ie, when you don't
expect the user to put the e-mail in an address book to use later.
Best would be to not expose any such information on the website; merely
forward forms to a page that processes the request, with the actual
processing taking place in the background.

Another trick is to convert e-mail addresses to unicode, which is
properly rendered in all browsers, and which dumb bots won't catch.
(Though any commercial bot would see through such a trick.) That
means, that instead of :
<a href="mailto:me@example.com">Send us a letter</a>
you would have
<a
href="mailto:me@example.com">
us a letter</a>

Walter Gildersleeve
Freiburg, Germany

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