Brought here from a PM;

Hello, Stevan.

I have described several ways to do this on my site: http://www.rickconner.net/spamweb/avoiding.html.

The JPG is a good way to do this, as typical spambots are unlikely to try to OCR any pictures they find on your site. However, it is tough to make pictures into a convenient mailto: link.

You can use HTML character entities, but these may not offer complete protection against spambots.

You can try munging the link (as you described), but again this doesn’t work well with a mailto: link.

I have used the java scri_pt trick (described on my site) for some time, and it seems to have provided good protection. It is not as difficult to use as it might sound.

-- rick

There are numerous web-sites out there that talk to this situation. Rick's is exellent.

However, the trend these days is to use a secure form-mail scri_pt with the actual addresses involved being contained outside the scri_pt (and the web-page) Again, there are numerous sources for this kind of code, but ... things like Operating Systems involved, access/permissions to applications, type of interfacing to your web-applicaions, etc. come into the mix, never mind the actual question of security and abusibility of the scripts involved.

I do mention these on my site. However, Wazoo is correct (as usual) to point out that mailback scripts can cause as many (or more) problems than they solve. Used to be that folks would put the mailto address right into the web pages containing their forms; not only could the address be harvested from there, the spammer could actually exploit the form to send mail to anyone.

Since having started to use WordPress on a blog I am keeping, I find that blogs provide a way to get feedback from readers without having to expose an e-mail address. Of course, you are then exposed to blog spamming (which may or may not be easier to deal with). Akismet has trapped all of the blog spam (without detaining "honest" replies) that I get, but then my blog is hardly what you would call widely-read.

-- rick