[thelist] Re: Hiding email address from spambots

[John.Brooking at sappi.com]

> As we know, anytime an email address is displayed on a 
> website, espically inside an <a href="mailto:"> tag, it will 
> eventually get harvested by a spambot.  I've found a couple 
> ...
>
> Before someone says it, yes yes, I know that the best way to 
> do it is with an html form and a server side script.

I gotta agree with others that the CSS solution is pretty cool, even if not
very supported (yet)! But as you say, the best way is with a form and
script. With a little work, you can even set up a form callable with
parameters, so you can replace <a href="mailto:me at mydomain.com"> with <a
href="/contact.html?to=me">, which is nearly as easy to remember and type as
the former. (That's important to me.) The form can submit to an emailer
script using only a key into a server-side table, so no email addresses are
ever exposed to the client. Only slight aggrevation is if you want to
reference multiple people on your site, you've got to add them to your
server-side table, and optionally add the key to a drop-down on your client
form (if you want the user to be able select from a list of people in the
form). I have implemented such an arrangement (using Perl with Mime::Lite
for the server side), if anyone is interested in seeing or using:

http://www.pobox.com/~JohnBrook/codelib/

- John
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