Internet Glossary : Obfuscation or Email obfuscation

I’m sure you’ll agree that email spam is a huge problem. You sift through tons of it every day. A nuisance.
How do they get hold of your email address?

If your email address is written ANYWHERE on the internet, including your company website, spammers, the people who send spam, have automatic computer codes that endlessly visit webpage after webpage looking for email addresses to harvest. Every time they find one they save it to a database, giving the spammer an automatically generated, non-discriminatory list of unwilling email victims.

What can you do about it?

Once they’ve got your address, there’s nothing much you can do unfortunately to pry it out of their hands. If they already have it you’ll have to rely on a good spam filter.

You can however take steps to prevent them getting hold of your email address from your website in the first place through a technique called email obfuscation.

Have a look at this website: http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/obfuscator.php

It sounds a bit mad but basically converts your email address into a form that can’t be easily read by spammers’ automatic harvesting robots.

Anywhere your email address appears on your website, replace it with the code generated by the email obfuscator for an extra level of protection.