Here's an example of an email address:

"johndoe@ someserv er.com"

which appears as: johndoe@someserver.com

To make link clickable, you need to include HREF tag, i.e.

" nospam@my server.co m"

which appears as: nospam@myserver.com

Try it. Copy either of those expressions (WITHOUT quotes), save it in an HTML file, and open it in your browser. It looks and acts just like any other email link, but spam bots only see numbers and characters.

Here are a few free email encoders:

(JavaScript utility)

(JavaScript utility, doesn't include HREF tag)

(emails results to you)

Encoded e-mail addresses can be read and translated back into original ASCII text by almost any web browser, so you can use encoding wherever you can use HTML. I've replaced regular email links with encoded links on all of my websites.

Unfortunately not all forums will let you use HTML. In those cases, you'll have to rely on putting NOSPAM in your email address, or using only "throwaway" email addresses such as from Yahoo or hotmail when posting to public places. Another trick: spell out your email address, i.e. my email address is "sharon at geolocal.com" or "sharon at geolocal dot com." Not as good as being encoded and clickable but better than nothing.

Of course, spammers are a clever bunch. Whatever we come up with, they'll find a way around. Pretty soon they'll probably program their nasty spam bots to translate encoded emails for them.

The only answer for that is to replace email links with an IMAGE of your email address. Only human eyes can see that an image is an email address, so it can't be harvested. But, *don't* link image to your email address unless it's encoded - that would defeat purpose, which is to make your email address unreadable by spam bots.

The downside is that human eyes will have to manually type your address to send you an email. Unfortunately, that includes people you WANT to hear from. There's no way around that. Hopefully one day we won't need to go to such lengths to avoid what has become scourge of internet.

So, to summarize:

1) use Mailwasher to delete and bounce spam, which hopefully will get you dropped from spam lists, and

2) encode your email address on web pages and other places where it can be harvested. Try one-two punch and see if it works for you. If nothing else, it will give you satisfaction of knowing spammers are getting useless messages in their mailboxes too.