Email Link Mangler protects your email address from the SpamBots

If your website contains a link to your email address and you haven't cloaked it, you are leaving your email Inbox wide open to the Spammers.

Try this simple test to see if you are at risk:

• Visit your website in any browser.
• Right-click on the page and select View Source or Source.
• Read through the page.
• If you can read your email address anywhere, you are at risk of being spammed.

It is well known that spammers use computer programs called Address Harvesters or SpamBots. These programs crawl the worldwide web just like the search engines, but they have only one task; to collect as many email addresses as possible from web pages.

If you can read your email address in your web pages, then so can the SpamBots.

When a SpamBot gets to your site, it reads the source, just as you did. The difference is that the SpamBots cannot recognise email addresses as easily as you can. They can look for the "@" symbol, but that doesn't guarantee that they've found an email address.

Instead, the SpamBots recognise email links. They look something like this:

The key is the highlighted part, "mailto:". This is what the SpamBots look for, combined with the following "@" symbol.

Email Link Mangler to the rescue

Email Link Mangler takes your email address and hides it from the SpamBots by converting it into codes that the SpamBots do not recognise. When pasted into your web page in place of your conventional email link, your email address is hidden from the SpamBots. They will scan the source of your web pages and they will never find "mailto:" or "@".

Instead, they will come across something that looks like this:

<a href="&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#58;&#121;&#111; &#117;&#114;&#110;&#97;&#109;&#101;&#64;&#121;&#111;&#117; &#114;&#100;&#111;&#109;&#97;&#105;&#110;&#46;&#99;&#111; &#109;"><b>&#69;&#109;&#97;&#105;&#108;&#32;&#109;&#101;</a>

Every browser will recognise this perfectly as a mailto: link, display it correctly, and the link will work perfectly.

No known SpamBot will decode this - the people who write the SpamBot programs couldn't possibly recognise every cloaking system, so they don't bother. There are thousands of unprotected sites out there. If the SpamBot doesn't find your email address, they just move on to the next site.

Easy to use

Simply run Email Link Mangler, enter your email address and click the Mangle button. Your email link will be generated, ready to paste into your web page. Press the Copy Code button to put the required code into the Windows paste buffer, and paste it into your HTML in place of all the conventional email links.

Upload your modified page to your webspace and your site is protected.