Adding email link to my blog | Blogs | Forums

Oh … that's such a good question!  Unfortunately, there is no easy answer.  

The problem – as you appear to know – is that there are spam robots out there just searching every web page looking for emailaddresses so they can copy them to a database and sell them, or email to them.  The simplest ones just look for the @ symbol and then grab everything before and after until the next space.  Many people feel that writing out their address as myname at gmail dot com will avoid the spam robots.  That will avoid many of them, but there are some really smart spammers out there who know how to program their robots to search for 'dot com' and figure it out.  

I've been told that putting your email address for all to see on any web page is like sticking a 'Kick Me' sign on your back!  It may take a while, but be assured that you will get spam sometime and once it starts ^$@^%#!  

I found a pretty good articles that tells you of all the different ways to hide your email online.  I think the one I like the best is to make a graphic, a picture with your email address showing (it could be done with Picasa and the text tool) then put that image into whatever page where you want people to be able to get your email address.  The bots can read what's in an image.

A simple solution, using blogger, is to tell people to leave you a comment.   If you have comments moderated then it will come to you in an email before getting posted.  That way … people can send you an email withOUT knowing your email address.  Pretty cool – but explaining that to people in the limited space of your sidebar can be a challenge.