Many websites display a contact email address in the format someone(AT)website(DOT)com so that bots looking for emails to spam are unable to read the address.

It has occurred to me that if you write your email in escape chars you will have an equal chance of escaping bot detection and your email will appear in the proper format - which is a neater solution and it would allow for the address to automatically fire up the user's mail program with the MAILTO: URL type link, an option not available using the (AT)(DOT) version.

For example, my email address would be written ... well I can't demonstrate because all the escape chars just get munged into the correct email address, but you get the idea.

Perhaps there are lots of people doing this already.

There are many generators on the web to change your email addresses in the source of your HTML script to an indirect string such that only your browser will display your email address correctly. This way, spam bots are unable to collect your email address and hence you will be kept away from them.

Search google for such generators. One of such is this..
http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php

I have my email address as gif images that can be seen by real people and not the bots. It is a hassle for people to write down the address manually - Buts its the only way to stop spam I feel.

Oh. Thanks.
I did think that neither method I described was much of a real defense because it would be a matter of simple programming for the spam bot to grab the disguised strings as easily as it grabbed regular addresses.

I saw a way once that was pretty cool. You have to have basic javascript enabled, but it keeps bots from being able to find it since you have to pass your mouse over it: It's from www.llamaguy.com.

I have seen that in http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php too you get a similar code if you chech "Javacript enabled". I wonder whats the MediaWiki style. I doubt if it is a website code because it is covered by square brackets like the Forum Code Style