For example, if I am reading an article on a blog about a doctor or lawyer and that professional's email address is hyperlinked, all I need to is click on the link to open my email program (in my case Gmail, but it could be Outlook or Yahoo Mail or any one of several).

By contrast, if the email address is not a link, I will have to manually open my email program, past the address and then send the email.

In my first web sites, I intentionally made my contact email addresses hyperlinks so colleagues and potential clients could easily contact me.

Big mistake.

Spammers use programs called "bots" to troll the web and harvest these clickable email addresses. Within a few months, my firm email address was (and is) essentially useless because of all the junk that arrives daily. I still keep it active because a lot of people over the years use that email address and I am reluctant to close it.

For years I have recommended to my clients that they use email forms (like the one on this site) rather than live, clickable email addresses. If you do not want to devote the real estate to a form on your site, you can put the form on a separate page, then use a link shortening service like tinyurl.com or cli.gs and post that address.

I recently learned about another solution called HideText.net. This free service takes any line of text, such as emails and converts it into a graphic.   Here is an example:

This email address a graphic and thus not currently readable by spambots. A nice and elegant tool.

Over the years, I have signed up for multiple GMail accounts for different purposes.  I always set up a GMail account for my consulting clients, and I use the account to add Google Analytics to my clients' sites.   Until now, it was somewhat cumbersome to check all of those GMail accounts – you had to sign out of one and sign into another.

GMail Assistant solves this problem.  GMail Assistant is a Firefox plug in that allows you to add the login information for all your GMail accounts into one tab.  If you want to switch from one account to another, you go to the dropdown and select the desired account and within seconds you are looking at a different inbox.

You can run Gmail Assistant as a stand alone application or try a Firefox plug-in version that is slightly less robust.