Hiding email addresses from spammers

Does show address with an image work?

[kiril]

I've heard that placing email addresses on a website will expose them for harvesting by spammers.

If this is true, can email addresses be hidden by displaying them with graphics instead of text, or do the spammers find things by looking through the source code?

If the graphics is not a solution, what other approaches are available?

Thanks

[claus]

Are you referring to a or b:

(a) an image in which the email address is written
(b) a link to the email address that is not text but an image

In the case of (a) then the email address will be part of an image and that image will not be readable by the email harvesters.

In the case of (b) you will still have the email address in your page source code and this will get read by the email harvesters.

Personally i have found that using mail forms only and not printing a mail address anywhere in the page source code gets me a lot less spam than otherwise (next to nothing). I do not know if i also get fewer real mails than i would otherwise do, but i suspect not.

/claus