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A Secret Code
Garble Your Email Address

Do you have a web-site that has your email address plastered all over it? Did you know that there are spam-bots that spider your web-site, designed to search for your email address? Then the spammers add your address to their bulk mailing lists, and sell it all over the Internet!!

With my huge site (www.borntolove.com) of 1,300+ web-pages, I was getting a ton of junk mail because of this problem. SiteLaunch used to have a Garbler page that would automatically turn your email address into secret code - just drop in your email address, and out would pop a garbled version! If you added this secret code to your web-site, the spam-bots couldn't read it, so they would simply ignore it and move on.

However, the Garbler site hasn't been working for quite some time. I just checked that site again today and got a 404 message.

I decided to hand-make my own garbled email address, and thought I would share how to make your own with you! It does take a little bit of work, but the lack of spam showing up in your mailbox everyday will be more than worth it!

OK, if just the mere mention of HTML coding gives you a head-ache, it's probably best that you click away now!

For those of you brave enough to venture into the the world of HTML, you can even use this secret code in your HTML editor, you don't have to know how to do raw code. Just look for View HTML on your Menu bar (or something similar) and drop your hand-made secret code into place.

First you will need the HTML character set found here:
www.htmlhelp.com/reference/charset/iso096-127.html

This is what you will use to make a secret code for your email address, just like when we were kids! You don't even need the secret decoder ring!

My email address is born2luv@idirect.com , so let's turn it into secret code:

Next you need to add these two characters - &# - before each code number and a semi-colon - ; - after each code number to make the code work. Taking the secret code number for the letter b, which is 98, we turn it into the number code set: b. Code number for the letter o is 111, so it becomes the number set : o and so on...

String it all together, and the secret code for born2luv@idirect.com now looks like this...

Make sure not to leave any spaces between each number code set, no hard returns and don't miss any of the &# or ; characters. If your code doesn't work and you have used the correct numbers, this is probably your problem!

To turn it into a click-able link on your web-page, instead of writing:

you would write it out like this:

If you are using an image or clip art for your link, you still aren't safe, but you can use the secret code this way to stop the spam-bots:

If you've decoded your email address correctly, when you paste your secret code onto your web-page and look at it in your browser, it should translate perfectly into your email address. Just like magic!

Everyone that comes to your site will be able to see your email address normally, as if it were not in code. But the spam-bots will pass it right by. Give it a click and send yourself an email!

Be-gone you nasty spam-bots!!

URL: http://www.borntolove.com/garble.html
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