We all have email addresses on our websites. These email addresses, unfortunately, are acquired by spammers that send a spider that harvests email addresses by scanning your website. This makes the process of having an email address on a website difficult.

Many website owners and website developers have gone to great lengths to hide an email address that includes making the email address an image or made the email address something like abd [at] company [dot] com. Both of these methods are protective, however, not practical or functional to the website visitor.

Changes that have taken place through global Internet organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have given way to a method that can hide the email address by encoding it, while keeping the process functional to the website visitor. This technique is not guaranteed however, this technique will still certainly go a long way towards minimizing your exposure to email harvesters and allow your website to work for the website visitor.

The below form will allow you or your website developer to encode your e-mail address through the use of Character Entities. You can learn more about Character Entities at the W3C. Your email address is encoded to the appropriate decimal equivalent entity and thus in the website’s coding hidden by most email harvesters.

Simply enter your regular e-mail address in the first text box, click the encode button, and then highlight and copy the resulting code produced in the second text box.

The encoded e-mail address can be understood by any web browser. You or your web develper can replace the email addresses within your website code and you will reduce the possibility of spammers harvesting email addresses while allowing for the functionality for the visitors to your website.

Here is an example how this looks on your website:

“For more information, send email to someone@company.com.”

In the source code for the web page, the above should look like this:

“For more information, send email to <a href=”mailto:encoded email address”>encoded email address</a>”