ArTips©-The newsletter dedicated to the business of art.

Sometimes practical, sometimes techy, always helpful.

The spam problem is getting worse and worse. If you have a website, you're probably already getting spam. If you don't have a website but are thinking about one, be aware that spammers have ways of "harvesting" your e-mail address to add to their list. Here are a few simple ways to help decrease the amount of spam you get. These tips won't help if you're already on the lists, but will prevent your e-mail address from being harvested in the future.

The first way is to use a form instead of publishing your e-mail address on your website. This takes some additional programming, but can be worth it in the long run.

A second way is to make your e-mail address a graphic instead of text. The disadvantage of this is that someone who wants to make an inquiry cannot just click on the address to send you an e-mail. They will have to manually type it in.

The third way is quite clever, but simple--encode your e-mail address. This is done where you normally have the "mailto" tag. You or your web designer can easily make the edits. Instead of using regular text, use ASCII code to hide your address from the spammers' robots. For example, in the mailto tag, instead of typing the letter "c", use "c" in the code. A full list of ASCII code can be found at ASCII Table. You don't need to encode your entire e-mail address, just enough to keep the spam robots from collecting your complete address.

There are a few other ways of hiding your address by using Javascript, but using code substitution is the easiest and works with all browsers.