Spam-Proof Email Address Generator

I want to put my email address on my website, but I keep getting email "spam" as a result. How can I stop this?

If you have a website then you probably want to put your email address on the site so that people can contact you. From this you can gain many genuinely useful enquiries about the products and services you supply.

Unfortunately, in the same way that search engines scour the internet looking for useful information, there are similar "web crawlers" or "spiders" which scour the internet looking for email addresses to send junk email, or "spam", to. This can quickly result in a mailbox so full of rubbish that useful requests for information can't be found.

A range of techniques exist for making it harder for these crawlers to find your email address. Some of them (like the extreme option of taking the email address off the site altogether) also make it harder for your customers to reach you. The technique we use, and which is described here, is the best method we have found for "obfuscating" the address, that is scrambing the address so that it can't easily be spotted by a web crawler, but still appears normal to people who need to use it legitimately.

To use it, enter your email address below, and click the "Generate" button. You will then be presented with some HTML code to insert into your site. To find out what it actually does, and how/why it works (and what it's limitations are), click here.

HINT: To use an image instead of text for the link, leave "link text" blank and fill in "image url" instead. So if you would normally have <img src="/icons/email.gif"> in your HTML, put /icons/email.gif in the image url box below.

HINT: Unfortunately, while this method might help to prevent your address being "harvested" in future, it won't remove your email from any existing address lists. If possible, therefore, we'd suggest using a new email address so that you can separate old from new. For example, if you currently use info@yourcomany.com, consider setting up sales@ or enquiries@ (or even webenquiries@ so you know where they come from) and using that instead.