preventing email harvesting

I've been asked to find out ways of reducing the amount of spam that people receive by having their email addresses harvested from our websites.

I read a report that concluded that using HTML numeric equivalents ("ex&#097 etc.) or replacing emails with a version that can be read by a human only e.g.
name(at)domaindotcom should result in receiving no spam.

Problem is the report was published in March 2003 so I'm wondering if anyone knows whether these techniques are still effective (assuming spambots have got smarter) or if there's a better way of stopping emails in web pages being harvested

Cheers
Burz

A little over a month ago, a virus came out that was harvesting email addresses off of Google and then masking itself as them. I got one of these and opened it (I receive emails from the public, so a lot of the protection features are disabled on my account), thinking it was a genuine email (coming from an address within the organization). There was no virus, just a weird bmp, but it freaked us out.
I went and pulled all email address off the web site. Hiding the actual text with ascii codes only does so much, because the link still has to have the actual email address. I actually went through and changed all the links to "Contact this Department" with the actual link to a JavaScript application which popped open an email form that reads the ID and displays certain fields and sends it to that department based on that ID.
Effective? I don't know, but I haven't had any similar experiences with virus emails. Plus, this works better for the user since with mailto you have to have your default mail client installed, and it causes lots of problems.
Hope that helps.

Right I dont actualy know any JS so this is probaly wong but use something along these lines in the href attribute.

Feel free to steal my code:
http://www.scifirstforhunters.org/static/index.cfm?contentID=341
Function is at the bottom of this JS:
http://www.scifirstforhunters.org/scripts/popup.js

However, like I said, you'll need to set up either a database, or a back-end in JavaScript to read the number/argument and decide to whom the email should go. You'll also need to process the email using a server-side language like ASP or PHP (the link above uses ColdFusion).
Hope that helps.

Another idea you may use is not to post your email address as text at all. Create an image with your email address on, and use that when you want to display your address. The more complicated you make the image, the harder it will be for spambots to grab the address.

Or or or don't post your e-mail adress and just use e-mail forms.

This seems to be the only way, at least for me, to cut down on spam. It hides the email address, but still allows the user to contact you from the internet. Unlike using mailto, this lets people that don't have a default email client email you with little hassle.