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I'm creating a public internet facing website which contains the email address of their salespeople.
What kind of programming options do I have to generate the "mailto" and display the email from that address but limit the spambots from picking up the address?
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Add a CAPTCHA: CAPTCHAs require users to confirm that they are not robots in order to prove they're a human being and not an automated script. One way to do this is to use a service like reCAPTCHA, Securimage and Jcaptcha.
By far, the easiest way to hide your email address from crawlers is by removing or replacing some characters. The most common method is to replace '@' character with [at]. It's fairly obvious to just about anyone what the correct address is and bots looking strictly for email addresses will get confused.
Recaptcha has an excellent capture based email protection. You can see it implemented at the bottom of any page in my website using the Site Feedback link.
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I know that Facebook does it by displaying an image instead of text. Sure, they could use OCR on the image, but why bother for just one email address?
If you really didn't want spam bots to get an email address, the best way is to never show it to anyone. Show a link to "Contact this person" which brings up a form. On the server side, send the contents of that form to the recipient, with a reply-to of the sender's email address. Include a little blurb at the bottom of their message that "if this email is spam, please 'click here' to block this user", which will then block the IP of the sender. I've used this method on a number of occasions and have never had a single complaint.
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