I am creating the front-end of a site. There is a place where the user can send an e-mail to the site owner, which I have implemented via an anchor tag with href="mailto:...". Now the customer says that we need a way other than mailto, which he says is spam-friendly. He also tells me that there are tons of JavaScript codes that I can use. Who can tell me what the problem is? What is the customer talking about? :) How can I solve this problem that I don't even understand?
EDIT: After all when I understand what my customer wants I understand also that I need a JavaScript email address obfuscator!!! Thanks to all!
If you put an e-mail address on a website, spammers can use automated scripts to find it. From that time on, it will be easy for them to send spam to the e-mail address.
If you use a form and let a server side script send the mail, the spammer can only abuse that form. You can protect the form using all kinds of methods, amongst which are captchas.
Also, if you do put the e-mail address on the site, but you're using Javascript to do so, the script that detects e-mail addresses now has to be much more complex, because it need to be able to execute or at least parse the javascript code.