On one hand you want to make it easy for the legitimate visitors to your web site to contact you about your web site and services. But you don't want your email address to be picked up by spam bots. So would my web site email address be hidden from spam bots if I just created an image that showed my email address?
That would work against the majority of bots, very few bots would identify that the image might have an email in it and bother to try and use OCR to get it. Another method is to use a contact link that opens a layer overlayed on the page or a popup presenting a CAPTCHA challenge and when successful, it provides the email in text format even with a mailto: link to save the user from typing it out letter by letter, possibly making mistakes. Finally, if it is for the purpose you mentioned, you can use a contact form, and have a server side script send the email to you with the data in the form. That might even be easier for your users than getting their email client or webmail open and sending.
Web scrapers could pick it up.. You can only do so much tho. I'd use a contact form instead and hide the address in a secondary form which the robots.txt file makes blocked.
An image would work but 1) you cannot then have it as a click link because the bots can pick up from the mailto link 2) users then have to read your image and type the address in manually to their email. This introduces two risks of either people miss typing (depending on how easy your email address is) or people deciding it isnt worth their effort when your competitors give a much easier link or form. A form is a better option however some people will still find this annoying and may not use it because they want to be able to use their email client. Contact forms are fine for most uses but if someone wants to write a very long email the small textarea given with most forms really isnt suitable (plus there may be reasons to want to use bold/ different colours etc)
Astorath, No reason why the textarea for the contact form can't be like the "quick reply" box on these forums which is expandable and has formatting options.
Hadn't noticed they were expandable It is still annoying (to me at least) when you cant just email because of spell checker (firefox obviously now helps here), having a copy in your sent folder, auto adding signiture, being able to CC/ BCC someone in etc
A have copy/pasted my email address to a gif and placed that, instead of the real email address. No coding. Easy to do. Spam safe (depends on your visitors)