Don't use the mailto tag.

As far as I am concerned the use of the “a href=”mailto:” tags is over. There are far too many email address mining bots roaming the internet to ignore the problem. I am recommending that everyone give up on using “mailto” tags completely and give real thought to even having your email address available as text at all.

Many recommend showing your email address only by spelling it out, like “name AT something Dot com” or some other similar form. This is certainly is far better than begging for your email to be harvested by using a mailto tag or putting it out there in the normal name@something.com form.

Truly I think you have to consider going to the next step and using an image to reveal your email address. A simple image will make your email address readable by humans but not buy your average spam-bot. Even this strategy is a little bit vulnerable, if you look at some sites that are real targets for spammers, like free email sites. They don’t just look for you to read a normal image to gain access they also tend to warp and distort the name so it isn’t readable by some sort of optical character recognition (OCR) software. This may be way over the top for your little website today, but don’t be surprised if you need to do this in the future.

If you want a real solution don’t bother with putting your email address out there at all. Set up a simple form and script on your site that will let people send you emails from your site without revealing your email address at all. Once you get a real response from a real person you can email them back and have a normal conversation with them without worrying about being a victim of spam.

So, in conclusion do not use the “mailto” tag and not expect to start receiving spam, and continue to receive more and more spam in the future. Think hard about hiding your email from bots by “spelling it out” or putting it in an image. Better yet use a submit form and script to never reveal your email address but still be able to use email in a reasonable sort of way.