Web authoring

The email harvesters (spambots) used by spammers scan your web pages looking for email addresses to add to their spam mailing lists. Obfuscating an address obscures or scrambles its characters, making it harder for a harvester to recognize. The most common method replaces characters with their numeric ASCII character code equivalents. Browsers automatically unobfuscate the address so that site visitors can read it. While this is a popular method to protect an email address, the harvester tests reported in this article show that newer harvesters now recognize many of these addresses.