Communication

Those of us who have websites usually want to be able to use our site to communicate our email address to those reading it. However, we've known for a long time now that spammers use bots to crawl the web, harvesting email addresses from pages. Having your email address visible in plain text on the web is therefore a pretty certain way to get a whole load of spam in your inbox.

Most of us who are aware of this therefore try to find ways to communicate our email address to our readers without having it visible in plain text. The usual approach taken is by presenting the information in such a way as the last step required to actually know the email address is difficult for a computer to achieve (at least in an automated way) but easy for a human.