In our last installment of HTML Tips, I went over a real simple way to be able to automate PayPal payment button downloads even without a real PHP page. In this installment, I’m going to cover something that is extremely important and it goes directly to the spam that you start getting the minute that you put you web site up. Did you ever wonder why that happens? Well, in this installment, I’m going to explain why it happens and show you a quick fix for the problem. This should be something basic that everybody learns before they put up a web site.

Let me first explain to you why you end up with this spam email. Most web sites, especially if you want to be contacted by potential customers, post an email address to be contacted at. Not having one is quite honestly, not good business. You could be losing a lot of sales by not having an email address. The problem is, with all the sophisticated spamming software that’s out today, putting an email address on a web page is suicide. The spambots, once they see that email address, will grab it, add it to their list and then sell that list to millions of people. That’s why you get tons of spam.

Okay, obviously, you can’t leave your email address off you web page, unless of course you don’t want people to contact you. However, there are a couple of things that you can do in order to make it so that you won’t get hit with tons of spam once you’ve put your web page up.

The simple solution is in the way that the email address is displayed. Your typical email link that people will click on to send you an email, will look something like this.

mailto:you@yourdomain

The way the spambots work is quite simple. They look for 3 keys that have to be in the following order: mailto, : and @. They then check to make sure that there is something between the : and the @ and something after the @. If so, they assume it is a valid domain and email address and harvest it. It’s that simple.

Now, what most people don’t know is that spambots can only read code. They can’t read actual text. So, all you have to do is change the code so that it still displays the email address properly for people to see but can’t be read by the spambots.

The simplest way to do this is to change the above code to the following:
mailto:you@yourdomain.com
The spambots can’t read this because of the @. This is gibberish to them, even though this is the same thing as putting in an @ symbol.
This is a quick, simple and dirty fix that doesn’t require you to buy any email cloaking software or anything like that. This will work fine. However, if you don’t want to go the email route at all, the more involved fix is to use an online form to have visitors send you a message via form submission, either to a database or to your email directly. However, that takes a lot more work.
Stick with the above trick. It works wonders.