MAILTO OBFUSCATOR

This program is an aide to help you hide your email address from 
spambots on web pages you post on the internet.

Spambots are programs designed to crawl through web pages, looking for 
email addresses.  They start with a web page (preferably one with lots 
of links on it), collect up any email addresses found there, then move 
on to any other pages linked to it... Crawling along page after page 
following every link it finds and collecting up every email address it 
can find.

Most spambots search for likely combinations of letters like 
SOMETHING@SOMETHING.COM, or SOMETHING@SOMETHING.ORG, etc.  Often they 
just search for the @ character and grab all the letters on each side 
on the assumption that it's a valid email address.

MAILTO OBFUSCATOR codes the email address into commands that a web 
browser will interpret, but most spambots won't.  The result is an 
email address that users can click on, but spambots can't collect.

It is "technically" possible for a spambot to be written to read the
codes that MAILTO OBFUSCATOR uses to hide your email address, but in
order to do that, the program would have to decode the entire page
before scanning (especially if you hide the mailto: command).  Most
will likely just move on to another web page that is easier.

Here is how to do it...

1.  Edit your hypertext web page file.  Either with an HTML editor, or 
a plain text editor like notepad.

2.  Find the MAILTO: command where users click on something to send you 
an email.

3.  Select the email address (or even better yet, the MAILTO: command 
AND the email address) and copy it to the clipboard by pressing 
CONTROL+C.

4. Run MAILTO OBVUSCATOR and paste the clipboard contents into the text 
box at the top of the program by pressing CONTROL+V.

5.  Press [Tab] to jump to the text box at the bottom of the program.

6.  The encoded text will be automatically selected for you, so just 
press CONTROL+C to copy it to the clipboard.

7.  Go back to your hypertext web page document (where the text you 
copied is still selected) and replace the selected text with the 
obfuscated code by pressing CONTROL+V.

8.  Save the hypertext web page and transfer it to your web space if 
necessary.

9.  Test it by loading the web page and clicking on the email link.  
You will find that the link works, but when you examine the source code 
the email address is coded.


This software was written by:

The Land of Awes Information Services
Post Office Box 16782
Wichita, KS  67216-0782


License:

You may use this program free of charge.  You may give it to your 
friends as long as you don't charge anything for it's distribution.