Why Wait Webs

A lot of people put their email address on their website, either as plain text, or as a link to their email address which will open the user’s default email client with the “To:” field automatically filled out. And why shouldn’t they? That’s what email addresses are for, right? To give to people who want to contact you. While this worked great several years ago, one thing has made this a very bad idea on the web today:

Spam.

Spam ruins everything, doesn’t it? These days, many spammers employ robots that crawl the web, going from site to site looking for email addresses to put on their list. These spambots are so prevalent now that putting your email address on the web for all to see is like sending an email to all the spammers that says “please send me all your offers!” But what are we supposed to do? Here are a few solutions that will allow people to email you with a greatly decreased risk of being placed on everyone and their brother’s spam list.

Alternative Ways to Give Out Your Email Online

Instead of having your email address listed in plain text, or as a link, directly on the page, here are three alternatives you can consider. Each of them has its downside, but hopefully at least one of these will work for your situation.

Web Form

A screenshot of the web form found on my contact page.

The ideal solution, in my opinion, is to set up a web form on your website. I’m sure you’ve seen these, if not check out my contact page. People fill out the form on your website, and you receive an email. If you email them back, they can use their email client to “reply” to you as normal. These web forms are usually coded with PHP, or another server side language. Because the email is stored on the server and never shown to the end user, these are extremely difficult for spam bots to exploit.

There are 2 downsides here. First is that it takes a lot longer to set up than a simple email link, but by the same token it’s not a difficult script to set up. Of course it depends who is doing your website, but it takes me about 1-2 hours to set up. The other downside is that you have to dedicate a whole page, or portion of a page, to the web form. Sometimes it’s nice to mention your email address offhand somewhere and let people know they can email you. I usually solve this dilemma by simply putting a link to the contact page instead of my email address. People are less likely to fill out the form if it has a lot of fields, so try to keep it simple.

Image Address

My email address as an image.

Another option is to use an image instead of text to display your email address. This, too, is demonstarted on my contact page. If you feel obligated to provide an email address in case people need to attach images and other files, or just in case they don’t feel totally comfortable with the web form, this is a good way to do it. You can also use it in your main content without dedicating an entire page to it. Most spam bots won’t be able to extract your email address from an image.

Unfortunately, there are some advanced bots out there that can read text in images. Maybe you’ve noticed captchas on a web forms, which ask you to enter a string of randomly generated characters and/or words. These words are usually distorted somewhat, sometimes so badly that they are hardly readable even by humans. This is to prevent robots from filling out these forms, and the distortion is because sometimes they can even read those images! However, if you need to get your actual email address to your audience, and a form just doesn’t cut it, this is perhaps the safest method. Using an image instead of plain text decreases your visibility to the spam bots many times over.

Remove the @ and the .

I wouldn’t suggest using this on your own site, since an image is a better solution. However, if you are working with a profile on some website that doesn’t allow you to use images, or are in a time constraint and need to get up and ready extremely quickly, this may be your only option. All this entails is replacing the @ and . with spelled out words. Here’s an example: john.doe [at] somewebsite [dot] com. Your visitors will catch the drift, but the spam bots usually won’t think it’s an email address. I’ve seen the [at] [dot] format used a lot though, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the spam bots start recognizing that format as an email address, if it hasn’t happened already. Your best bet is to come up with your own creative way of punctuating it.

I hope that one of these methods is helpful to your situation. I’m not a security expert, this information is based on personal experience being spammed A LOT, and related articles that I have read through my years of being a web designer. If it is all-important that your email be secure from spammers, I suggest hiring a professional to advise you. However, this article is geared more at people who are considering or have already placed their email address right in the text of their website. Any of these three ideas is significantly less likely to get your email address put on a bunch of spam lists.

Let me know in the comments if you have a situation that none of these methods will work for; I’ll try my best to give you another viable alternative. Also comment if you have employed any other methods of letting people contact you via email whilst hiding the address from spam bots. And don’t forget to check back often or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for reading!