Tips For All -- Fighting Spam

We all want to fight Spam. And we all want to keep our emails away from the automated scripts that hunt for email ids. The first thing that we need to do is to understand what these bots are looking for:
(a) The @. It is a fundamental part of any email id.
(b) Something before and after the @.

What most people do is to include some obvious word in their id so that humans can remove it when mailing them. I am sure you have seen email id's such as mailme@theheroNOSPAM.com or iamDELETE@superb.net It is obvious that the words DELETE and NOSPAM are not part of the actual id. Nevertheless you could include a line saying that these words need to be removed before sending an email.

But a real smart trick can be accomplished using CSS. Let me first describe the CSS class:

.emailID {
direction: rtl;
unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
}

Now you know some scripts like Hebrew are not left-to-right but right-to-left. Suppose your email id was written right-to-left. ni.oc.oohay@alalxunil means nothing to you does it? It is of no significance to these scripts either. .com, .net, etc. should succeed the @, not precede it.

With the CSS class written it is now time to write your email address. Let's say you are a gentlemen. How would you give your id:

Please mail me your suggestions at div class="emailID"ni.oc.oohay@alalxunil/div

Do remember that div class="emailID" needs to be enclosed in horizontal brackets <>. So do /div. Because the template here is also in CSS I can not write the div class within brackets.

Voila! Your email id would appear normal to the viewers 'coz you have asked text to be displayed right-to-left in the CSS class. But to the bots it is as it is, meaningless.

P.S. You can do a google to learn more about uniocode-bidi. Basically it is for languages which are not traditionally left-to-right. Bidi stands for bidirectional.