JavaScript Yourself Anonymous -- In response to letters on hiding your email address on a Web page to avoid spammers sucking it down, Joseph McLean <flux@thecentre.com> wrote us with a nifty JavaScript-based solution, which he offers for free:

Brandon Munday mentioned how he removed all "clickable" mailto links from his Web site to thwart the evil address-collecting spiders. Making a site non-clickable is so counter to the Web's nature that I became convinced there had to be another way. And there is - if you turn to JavaScript for aid.

JavaScript is not ubiquitous technology, but this can also work in your favor, because spiders don't speak that language - and most of your human visitors have browsers that do. Here's an example I cooked up in five minutes.

This chunk of code can be pasted into your Web page's HTML at any point. Some old browsers don't support JavaScript, but they won't hit an error - the mail link will simply be invisible (as it is to spiders).