Weblogs

A few weeks ago, I found myself wondering why a lot of blogs that I read displayed their e-mail address as somebody (at) something dot com, instead of hiding it behind an href tag, like i have or just simply saying somebody@something.com.

Now, I believe I may have found part of the answer in this PC Mag article.

Professional spammers constantly scan the Web using high-speed programs known as harvesters to capture visible e-mail addresses. Harvesting addresses in this way is illegal in the U.S. under the CAN-SPAM Act, which became law on January 1. But that hasn’t stopped the practice.

Does this mean you can never put your e-mail address on a Web page? Not at all. If you use the right methods, you can let people know how to get in touch with you—and still keep spammers from harvesting your address.

The easiest way is to spell out the “@” sign and the period, like this: brian at example dot com. In the Center’s study, addresses that had been obscured in this simple way on Web pages did not receive a single piece of spam.

So, all you bloggers (well, you and you), is this why you have it displayed so?