If you have a website, you most likely have included a way for readers to contact you via email. “Click here to email Joe Shmoe” is a common sight. In order for your web browser to know what to do when you click that phrase, it goes to the html coding embedded in the web page. You click on the link, and the email address is automatically entered in your email program’s “Compose Message” screen, ready to go.

The standard HTML coding to tell browsers the email address is a simple command. Unfortunately, people with nothing better to do than send you Spam have developed methods to “harvest” your email address from the coding on your website. They have created automated programs to look for “mailto:name@yourdomain.com” and then they’ll send you all kinds of junk.

How to get around this? There is a freeware program called The Enkoder that “protects email addresses by converting them into encrypted JavaScript code, hiding them from email-harvesting robots while revealing them to real people.”

All the email links on this site are created using this program. What your reader sees is exactly what you’d expect to see. For example, look at the email link on the Contact page.