Protecting email addresses on web pages from junk mailers.
Web crawlers scan websites and automatically collect email addresses which
are then used for sending out junk email. If you don't want to receive increased
amounts of junk email you should prevent your address from being collected
in this way. The method described below achieves this by allowing an email
address to be hidden from most web crawlers while allowing it to be read
normally when viewing the page containing it with a web browser. It relies
on Java being enabled in the web browser and this is normally enabled by
default. The fragments of the email address included are assembled by the
Java program code surrounding it when run by the web browser.
To make e-mail addresses on web pages unreadable by web crawlers
Replace address in the html code such as
warwick@phon.ucl.ac.uk
by the lines
<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">
document.write('warwick@' + 'phon.ucl.ac.uk')
</script>
If you want to include the "mailto:" facility then replace the existing
with
something like this:-
<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">
emailE=('warwick@' + 'phon.ucl.ac.uk')
document.write('<A href="mailto:' + emailE + '">' + emailE + '</a>')
</script>
IMPORTANT
You must edit the .html or .htm file containing the email address
using either a simple ascii text editor or by using the 'view/edit html source'
option in a web page editor. If you edit the page using normal
edit mode in a web page editor, web browsers will display the Java code and
email address fragments you entered instead of the email address
Departmental
Computing Information