Best way to obfuscate an e-mail address on a website?

I've spent the past few days working on updating my personal website. The URL of my personal website is (my first name).(my last name).com, as my last name is rather unusual, and I was lucky enough to pick up the domain name. My e-mail address is (my first name)@(my last name).com. So really, when it comes down to guessing it, it's not very hard.

Anyways, I want to integrate a mailto: link into my website, so people can contact me. And, despite my e-mail address not being very hard to guess, I'd rather not have it harvested by spam bots that just crawl websites for e-mail address patterns and add them to their database.

What is the best way for me to obfuscate my e-mail address, preferably in link form? The methods I know of are:

<a href="mailto:[email protected]">e-mail me</a>

It works, but it also means that as soon as my website hits Google, I'll be wading through spam as spam bots easily pick out my e-mail address.

<img src="images/e-mail.png" />

This is less desirable, because not only will visitors be unable to click on it to send me an e-mail, but smarter spam bots will probably be able to detect the characters that the image contains.

I know that there is probably no perfect solution, but I was just wondering what everyone thought was best. I'm definitely willing to use JavaScript if necessary, as my website already makes use of tons of it.

Solution 1:

I encode the characters as HTML entities (something like this). It doesn't require JS to be enabled and seems to have stopped most of the spam. I suppose a smart bot might still harvest it, but I haven't had any problems.

Solution 2:

Personally, I've given up on hiding my email address. I find it easier to look into better spam-filtering solutions than worry about obfuscating. You could spend days trying to find the best way to obfuscate your address, and then all it takes is one person to sell your address to a spammer and all that work was useless.

Solution 3:

The current accepted solution is to create a contact form that allows users to email you. If you receive a lot of spam from that (I don't on my site), then you can add a captcha for good measure, and you'll be far from the "low hanging fruit" at that point.

The fact of the matter is that if you are providing a link that a user can click on to pop open their email client with your address in the To: field, then the computer is able to decipher the email address from the page and so can a spam bot.

Solution 4:

You mentioned this is for your personal website. On my personal site (for example, bobsomers.com) I just have a paragraph that says this:

The best way to get in contact with me before the new site is up is to send me an email. My email address is my first name at this website. If you can't figure it out from that hint, well, you might find email more of a challenge than figuring out my address.

People seem to be able to figure that out just fine, as I get legitimate email all the time. Sometimes the best solutions don't require writing any code. :)