Dreamquick - 2:08 pm on Nov 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

If you keep them in linked plaintext then they will get harvested sooner or later, you can improve your odds a little by protecting clickable email addresses using e-mail entity encoding (google for it) so that it makes it harder for them to find addresses on the page.

I'd also suggest encoding parts of the "mailto:" prefix so that this doesn't become the weak part of the system...

Otherwise your best bet is to not show email addresses unless the user registers or deal with it the FriendsReunited does and don't actually expose the email addresses on the site but instead act as a trusted 3rd party which establishes communication between the two people.

- Tony