How'd They Get My Email Address???
by Gary Woods'

One of the big sources for spammers to get email addresses is from web pages. Professional spammers scan the Web using high-speed programs called harvesters to capture visible email addresses. So does this mean you can never put your email address on a Web page? Not at all, there are ways you can let people know how to get in touch with your and still keep spammers from harvesting your address.

One of the easiest ways is to spell out the "@" sign and the period, like this "Gary at my site dot com." But to truly make your address invisible to the harvester display it as a graphic. You can do this by opening Microsoft Paint or a similar graphics application and select text mode. Type your address, switch to the Select tool, and select the area where your address appears, saving it as a GIF file.

If you have an email link on your site it's important that the HTML code behind it not contain your email address in plain text. Harvesting programs can read code, not just the characters visible in the browser.

To protect your clickable links from being harvested, try the free encoding service at www.hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php. Hiveware's Enkoder lets you enter the address you want to protect and the link text that will be visible on your Web page. Then they generate code which you can just cut and paste into your site.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910'