John F. Collins, of JFCollins Associates, writes with an interesting tool for webmistresses, the "E-Mail Address Encoder/Obscurer".
It is polite to put a contact email address on your web page. For some applications, multiple email addresses are appropriate. The problem is that then the lowlife spamming scum can harvest those email addresses. I assume we all use spam assassin or something similar to keep the stuff down, but there's no point in making it easy for the bums.
One solution is to obfuscate the email address: something like "barackobama at whitehouse dot gov" or "billg@eat.flaming.turds.microsoft.com". The disadvantage of those is that they require the users — the people you want to email you — to edit the email address before they can use it.
This tool requires a bit of work on the part of the web master: encode your email addresses in character entities. It turns my email address into "charlescurley…". So anyone (say an email address harvesting script) looking at the source code for my web page will see that. But a human being using a sensible browser like firefox will see the text. Much more user friendly.
It isn't perfect. I'm sure some spammer scum will figure this out. But it's a step.
And thanks to the folks at West Bay Web for coding it up and making it available.