Preventing 'bots' using your contact email address on a website?

[tricky]

Is there anyway to prevent spambots (or whatever the hell they are called these days!) from trawling your company website and using your email address? For instance, is it better to use agraphic with a 'hotspot' mailto: link than a html text based email address?

Bear in mind I am a relative novice when it comes to website designs. I am using Dreamweaver MX2004 if it is important.

[plastic_]

I use javascript to cloak the email address, it's described here for example:

http://www.robelle.com/tips/email-cloak.html

this way the email address is never visible in the source code (it's scrambled), bots can't recognize it (unless they are trained for the specific situation),
for humans it still looks the same, because it's just rendered text.

If javascript is disabled in the browser, then it isn't visible though. But there are not many people who disable javascript altogether, only the most paranoid. (about 1%)

I wouldn't use an image, unless it really fits into the design, besides that doesn't help anything, the link is still in the source code.

Unfortunately that all won't help you to get rid of spam, because newer bots don't really scan the web for emails, but rather work with spyware.
So if anyone you communicate with has some spyware that monitors his/her email application (or hotmail, gmail, etc), you're in the spam database. Like facebook offers you to scan the gmail account for friends. The virus/spyware doesn't ask

If you have a spam problem I'd recommend routing it through gmail, or google apps, those are much better than anything else I've seen.

[simmsimaging]

+1 for gmail. I route through that now and its filtering is amazing.

b