PCSC

Protecting your E-mail Address

Although spammers probably most often just auto-generate addresses to which they send spam, you can attempt protect your address, and perhaps cut down on the problem somewhat.

When developing Web sites
If you include your e-mail address on a Web page, you could find an increase in spam to the exposed address. However, you need to be able to provide people with contact information, so here are some suggested alternatives:

a) Make links to a Contact page called something like "contactinfo.html" and, within the HEADER of that page, place this meta tag (which protects the page from search engines): <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> You could also just put this tag onto any page that has an e-mail address and doesn't need to be available as a search.

OR

b) Paste the HTML numeric equivalent of your text into the code right where you want the e-mail address to go. One converter to provide you with this numeric address can be found at www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html

For example, instead of your code containing mailto:jschmoe@bu.edu, it would now use mailto: &#106;&#115;&#099;&#104;&#109;&#111;&#
101;&#064;&#098;&#117;&#046;&#101;&#100;&#117;

OR

c) Write out the e-mail address in text. For example, mailto:jschmoe@bu.edu becomes mail to: jschmoe at bu dot edu.

OR

d) Put the addresses in a directory that's limited for BU-only use as described at www.bu.edu/webcentral/learning/restrict/protect.html