I always received a bit of spam from email harvesters who were a bit ahead of their time. However now they all seem to have found a remedy for the below:

<script language="JavaScript">

var username = "[your_username]";

var hostname = "[your_mail_account_domain]";

var linktext = username + "@" + hostname ;

We seem to be getting a crazy amount of spam emails now - 50 an hour or so. I used to use hex encoding but that was prior to the above. Can anyone recommend a good way to encode an email address.

Nobobdy should be using a captcha when trying to retain customers enquiries from the website.

As far as I am aware the best way is to use a php form with a captcha, email harvesters cannot get your email address if it's not in the html and is not on a readable file.

 

When it comes to spammers using your form, a captcha helps but I also think using another method, for example timing the speed the form is filled out, will double the chances of catching spammers in the net

 

There are other ways of course, hiding input values for example, if it gets filled out then it was a spammer or even trying to catch with rules implemented based on keywords in the message.

You could always use Cloudflare who will protect email addresses automatically.

Based on my own experience of having some very busy sites that attract a lot of spam, and that of our customers, the best method is to go with using something like Akismet and a form to email.

 

Akismet is used by WordPress to stop blog comment spam but also has an API so you can use it with other solutions, we implemented it for Perch forms and comments. The thing with Akismet is that is learns from all the missed spam that gets marked as spam so picks up even the hand entered spam.

 

If you must publish email addresses then really the only thing to do is find some industrial strength spam filtering on the email account. My email address is _everywhere_ and I use MailRoute which does a pretty good job of filtering out the junk.

Have you tried just putting your email on pages in this format example(At)mysite(DOT)com if you must put it on a webpage. As for form spam I just posted a PHP class i built for use with my blog software that is pretty effective at stopping spam http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/topic/80879-simple-spam-prevention-class-i-built/ .And can be modified to suit your own website. You could also just use a simple spam trap inside your form and see if that helps.