I am putting up some web sites, primarily for personal use. Some parts of the site require a user to login and so I have no problem with posting semi-private info in there. However, on the "front page" I want to provide my email address so that visitors that do not already know the login info can drop me a line to request it (giving me the chance to be sure I know who is getting it).
Now, I've heard of bots similar to what search engines use that crawl the web and scour for email addresses on web sites. It sounds very reasonable of a tactic and if it doesn't actually happen now I'm sure it will very soon. I have also heard suggestions on how to present your email so people can decipher it but automated systems wouldn't recognize it as an address ( such as writing: "lawrence AT foo.com" vs. "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" ). Normally this is fine except for two things:
1. Some friends and family members are a little less technically inclined than others and may not figure out how to translate that without an obvious and distracting explanation.
2. I would really like to simplify things (for those same members) by using the mailto: tag, but I don't know if the actual HTML code including the mailto would be scanned by spam-crawlers and defeat the whole thing.
I really doubt that I'm not the only one on the list with this concern and I hope some of you have some creative ideas on avoiding this. I can honestly and proudly say that my personal email accounts (not counting my spam-magnet hotmail account I use for website registrations) get absolutely NO spam in them to date and I really don't want to mess that up.
advTHANKSance!!!
-Lawrence
