How to make email tags (mailto:) non-crawlable?

I was going to say;

"Spammers are 99.9% assholes looking for a quick buck. Programmers have much more interesting stuff to deal with."

But I guess in this day & age, even mildly intelligent & conscionable people are out for a quick buck, thanks to the tax systems we have in the (supposed) developed world.

 

Cool, going to give it a try

 

Totally agree. Since changing all of my mail links to a Javascripted link my spam has practically disappeared. Most spammers simply run a bot which looks for the 'mailto:anyone@anywhere.com' code. Remove that and they move on to one of the millions of other sites which are still using it. Sure, someone could take the time to read the script and work it out but 99% of them won't bother.

One other thing to consider is to avoid generic mail names. Info, webmaster, accounts, sales, contact....A lot of these guys will simply send to 'genericname@anywhere.com' in the hope of catching a few addresses. So use the Javascript and be a bit more inventive with your mail names.

 

To add to what you have said, Actor Mike - the only spammers that I have a problem with now, are the only ones that I EVER had a problem with. Those are the pesky Indian and Chinese companies and individuals, who will actually spend the time to fill out my webform, anyway. So what's the point of having a webform, if it doesn't discourage this sort of trick? (especially when it doesn't work right, anyway!)

I sincerely want to thank everyone who contributed time to answer this questions. I'm very grateful, and quite happy with the results.