One of the most common methods of gathering email addresses to be spammed, is to retrieve those addresses from emails posted on Web sites or in newsgroups. This seems to be the best way to have your email address receive the most spam. Spammers use software harvesting programs such as robots or spiders to gather the email addresses listed on Web sites, and include them in databases to be used in sending spam.

These robots and spider programs read the Web site and look for valid email addresses such as "john.doe@mycompany.com". Once recognized as a valid email address, it is collected and written to the spam database to be spammed at a later time. One way to prevent this from happening is to obscure or disguise the email address such that humans can still read the email address on the screen, but the robots and spiders cannot. Robots and spiders appear to not be able to read an encoded email address, yet most browsers can translate the encoded address so that you can visibly read the correct name and domain. An encoded address means using decimal values, or HTML numeric equivalent, rather than using standard alphanumeric characters.

For example, the address "john.doe@mycompany.com", if used as is, would attract the spammer robot because it is clearly a valid email address. But after encoding the email address, it looks like the following inside the HTML code. This is not easily read by the spammer robot, but most browsers will translate the encoded address to a normal looking email address. The "email cloaking utility" program seen below can be used to generate HTML code for any email address. You can use this here on our Web site for free. Just click the "Cloak My EmailAddress" button below to use the free utility.