Much like everyone else, I hate spam. Unfortunately, high-level languages (e.g. Visual Basic) have made it so easy to write code to crawl webpages collecting email addresses for malicious purposes, that the kind of people who would be inclined to do so are now capable, as well. So, as convenient as it may seem, posting your email address on your website puts you at risk for getting a ton of spam. A number of methods exist to avoid malicious web-robots. The idea is to display email addresses in a format that is human-readable, but not as easily machine-readable. One such format is something like: [my first name] at blah blah blah [dot] net, which may be reasonably secure, for now. A better approach, I believe, is to create an image format of your email address instead of text. One potential downside to both of these methods is the fact that you can no longer just copy and paste addresses. I present here an alternative method to solve this problem: a script that at runtime, puts your email address together as text from some semi-obfuscated mess which looks nothing at all like an email address. This way you can still copy and paste the address (keeping your OCD friends happy), but be under the radar of even a somewhat sophisticated web-robot. I have furthermore put a command button on the page to help ensure that there is a user on the other end, although even without it I suspect that very few spam-enabling web-robots would have been able to extract the text generated at runtime. Anyway, just enter an email address in the box below, hit the button, and this page will generate such a script (just for you!) which you can copy and paste into your own page. See the instructions below for more details, and to see an example, look at my home page.

Enter an email address:



Now, just copy the script at the top into your webpage and copy the form at the bottom to the appropriate place on your page where you'd like your email address to show up. For an example, you can look at my home page, which uses the output of this program. However, I also included other html tags, so that you can actually just save the entire output above as a .html file and try it out in your browser. Anyway... I hope this reduces the number of viagra-related items in your inbox.