Securely embedding an email Address in a Xara Website

Hi - apologies this is a pretty basic question - but keen to get some views.

Want to put a contact email address within the text of a website. Want to do that 'in context' [in a sentence] and on multiple pages.

Also want to avoid that address being immediately harvested by the bots.

But I do want visitors that don't run an email client to be able to 'see' the address.

My thought is to embed an image of the address within the text and then create a mailto link via web properties.

But will this work? Will that image simply be 'read' by the bots? And does the mailto link give me any protection within Xara?

Grateful for any feedback....

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Originally Posted by Bunzena

Hi - apologies this is a pretty basic question - but keen to get some views.
Want to put a contact email address within the text of a website. Want to do that 'in context' [in a sentence] and on multiple pages.
Also want to avoid that address being immediately harvested by the bots.
But I do want visitors that don't run an email client to be able to 'see' the address.
My thought is to embed an image of the address within the text and then create a mailto link via web properties.
But will this work? Will that image simply be 'read' by the bots? And does the mailto link give me any protection within Xara?
Grateful for any feedback....

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Buzena, Xara has already do this:

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Technical note: Xara Designer Pro+ [applies to Xara's other products as well] encodes your email address to reduce the likelihood that SPAM robots will find your email address from the web page. This requires Javascript [sic] to be enabled in the browser (currently >95% of browsers).

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Acorn

You can link the email address to a link such as the text: Click here to send email, then Xara will as Acorn points out, encode the email address.

As a follow up for the few whose email clients will not automatically open when they click the link, add the actual email address as a bitmap. The visitor will be able to see the address but a spambot will not.

There is another method called Anti-Spam https://www.auditmypc.com/freescan/antispam.html that provides a script that you can add to the contact page Body code that displays the actual mailto: linked email address but when spambots try to harvest the email address creates a list of 20 bogus email addresses. There is a better explanation on the page.

Thanks Acorn - makes perfect sense.

But is there still a risk - in your view - of linking the mailto to an image of the address in the text? For example

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Thanks gwpriester! ;-)

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Originally Posted by Bunzena

Thanks Acorn - makes perfect sense.
But is there still a risk - in your view - of linking the mailto to an image of the address in the text? For example
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Very little.

Think it through.
At some point a bad person will see the email and add it to a spamming list.
Somewhere else a contacts list on a PC will be hacked and it has your email.
If it's out there, it will be recorded.

So instead make sure you have a good spamming email application.

I have a specific email address I use for 'iffy' contacts.
To date, it has never returned a SPAM email.
Either my service provider has the best product going or nobody likes me enough.

Acorn