email spammers

[Juls]

I have a PHP page that calls up email addresses from a MYSQL database. Are these email addresses vulnerble to spammers that have programs that harvest email addresses off the internet? And if so, what can I do to protect these addresses from spammers??

Thanks in advance.

[dalecosp]

How is this page called? If a search engine can (and does) index the page, then it seems certain that email address harvesting could be accomplished. OTOH, just because you have a database with addresses doesn't mean that will be harvested easily....

Using a "robots.txt" file may keep most search engines off of your page.

Perhaps it should be protected somehow? Password auth, perhaps? What's its purpose?

[Juls]

The page with the email addresses is linked to the index.php page. This page has a php script that reads the email addresses from a mysql database. It is a site providing contact information that has to be available to the public, so I don't have the option of password protecting the page itself. But I don't want spammers to harvest addresses from this site! Will robot.txt file be able to prevent spammers from harvesting addresses? Since the page doesn't display the addresses until the page is called, can the email addresses be harvested fromt he database itself? Or can a harverster launch a page and then harvest the addresses?

[planetsim]

for each email change things like so

e.g. [e-mail]

to

myemail at domain dot com

$email = '[e-mail]';
	$email = str_replace("."," dot ",$email);
	$email = str_replace("@"," at ",$email);

An Easy way to do it. Theres probably a quicker way

[Juls]

Thanks for the responses so far!

I'm still not clear whether my email addresses are in fact vulnerable if they reside in a mysql database and are only displayed when the contact.php page is called. When the contact page is called, the email addresses are displayed in a html table. Will a spam robot find them??