Right then, firstly, I'm still a little "wet behind the ears," Web development wise so forgive me if this is basic stuff.

I've been looking at different ways to hide mailto: links from spammers. Yes, I know I can use a script to send form data via email, and I am already doing that. It's great for those that just use webmail based emails like hotmail, etc.

It occured to me that for usability a mailto: link is much more friendly and allows the user to make use of their preferred email client. Plus it has the potential to reduce the amount of visitors I can alienate.

I started with a simple mailto: link that utilised some javascript to hide the email address from display in the browser. Reasonable, but doesn't stop the source code from being parsed for email addresses, which is what the spam crawler bots do.

I hate spam and have been able to filter and drop the spam email on the email host. Good, but I want to go one step further - I hate the thought that my email addresses used on the site are generating spam and needless Internet clogging traffic (albeit a tiny amount in the scheme of things), even if it is just going to a *nix blackhole.

So my quest began! After some research with my good friend Google I found an interesting site with a variety of different methods. I've tried a few, but they each have drawbacks and the site needs to be as accessible as possible.

My quest continued and I happened upon an ingeniously simple solution, or so it seemed at first.

I'm using the perl script URI redirect with the iframe code included. This works really well, in Internet Explorer, but not Firefox. Well, it does work in Firefox but additionally Firefox opens a download dialog, which could frighten a visitor to the site and I'm back to alienating my visitors! Heh!

Is there anyone out there in the knowledgeable world of Antionline that might be able to help me on this one? I'm sure it's something simple, however, it's too simple for even me to work out.

Many thanks in advance.

P.S. You can try it on my test site contact page if you like.

Oh yeah my Internet Explorer version is 7.0.5730.11 and Firefox is 2.0.0.11.