Can I create an email address within HTML?

I help support a simple website that sends an email message to its owner. The spam bots have apparently found this web page and its embedded email address because we get a lot of spam at this address.

The HTML line looks like this:
<a href= "mailto:marylou@gmail.com ">marylou@gmail.com</a>

Can I somehow create an email address within the HTML without explicitly coding the email address, thereby avoiding the spam bots? Or is there some other way for a webpage to send to an email address without explicitly revealing what that address is in the HTML?

I am aware of the technique where the webpage user is asked to enter a few characters as a way of insuring that a human being is doing it. I don't want to add that extra complication if there is some other way to do it.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Thanks Tony - it works like a charm. I also found information at:

http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/security/harvesters/javascript.html

and

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_does_cgi_work.html

Thanks again.

 

You can hide things further by encoding the addresses. For example, by converting the letters in the e-mail address components, to their Hex equivalents. Server side systems such as PHP and Ruby on Rails have function that will do this for you (see this and this for example).

If this is a static page you'll have to work out the hex equivalents for the address components yourself, but there are tools to help you with this. Do a google search for 'ascii to hex' and you'll get plenty of applications, like this one.

 

Nice link Tony.