Stopping Spam, which one maybe safer?

[Lunatic3]

I dont know if this is a right forum to ask the question or not, but hope someone help me.
Am desiging a web site that holds the information for many ppl. In fact their email address should be present at the page so people can mail them. I have three choices
1- Put a link for their email address :mailto:....
2- Explicity write the email address without any link.
3- Explicity write the email address, providing the link mailto:...

If the viewer of the site wants to email the person and does not wish to use his mail client like outlook express, then:
In case 1: he has to read the link property or click on it to open its mail client and then copy paste the address in his own mail box.
In case 2: He simply copy pastes the address.
In case 3: He may copy paste the address or choose to send mail using default mail clinet.

Considering ease of use to me it seems case 3 is the best choice.
But here comes the problem of spammers. I dont know how deep they dig into the web pages to find email addresses. Do they just read the text, or go deep into the html code and extract emails?
So which one of the above can better avoid spams?

Thanks

[ccoder]

Take a look at the example at: http://www.designplace.org/scripts.php?page=1&c_id=20

I use the same technique, but take it a step farther. Rather than code the user and domain in readable text, I use the ascii representation, i.e. &99;&99;&111;&100;&101;&114 = ccoder

[Lunatic3]

Good idea, but that would stop the crawlers like google accessing the email addresses too? right?

[ccoder]

Our previous ISP went belly-up February of last year and we had to move to a new provider. Since I had to change the domain in all of the email links in our web site's pages, I also modified them to use this technique.

Only in the past month or so have I begun to receive spam again - maybe 2-3 items a week. That was about 14 months with no spam what so ever. I am sure that the current spammers acquired my addy by some other means.

[Lunatic3]

I am sorry, but still i didnt get the answer to what I asked. I think the crawler google uses to index its web pages does not support scripts, so in this case the email addresses wont appear in the Google too. Am I right?
As this web site is for an educational institute, I think if applying that method also stops search engines to index the pages and emails of the faculty then they shold make a decision on giving up one for sake of another.

[ccoder]

Sorry, I implied, but didn't specifically state, that I believe it would prevent any crawler/bot from detecting the email address.

I'm not sure what you meant by "giving up one for sake of another". What does the faculty want to achieve and/or prevent?

[Lunatic3]

The faculty may like that the visitors of their site see their emails explicitly on the page. So they might give up this in sake of not receiving any spam.

[ccoder]

If you use the technique listed at the web site that I provided, what the faculty (and web site visiters) will see is the text that you use to replace Link Text in the line document.write('Link Text</a>');.

The JavaScript executes on the client side and writes the link into the web page. If you move the mouse over the Link Text, the email address will display in the web page's status bar. If you click the link, your email client will launch with the To: address populated (as will be Subject and BodyText if provided).

If you want to see an example of this in action, go to:
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~sandlier/bruce/index.htm then scroll all the way to the bottom. There you will see 4 graphics that read Home Top Email Guestbook. Move the mouse over the Email graphic to see the link display in the status bar.

[Lunatic3]

Thanks, I know what you are saying. I tried that and put the Link text (that is the faculty name) out of the script so it can be indexed easily by the search engines and used ascii represantations of the letters in hex, even the '@'. I will use that method for all of the email links.

Thanks again

[matheson]

make the page in asp make a mail robot... then encrypt the page