email contact addresses on website

elljay

Hi, what's generally considered to be the best way of showing email addresses in contact details on a website. We are concerned about encouraging spam if we put the full address on, alternatives seem to be to put a link which will open the enquirers email package when clicked, or a webform. But apparently people don't like those.

What's the best way of giving contact addresses?

Thanks

Liz

free4440273

If it's a legit business, then a full email address would be ideal and professional. One idea could be to make it generic (so any spam email does not come to you, person-wise), so: customer_services@company.com

trcooke

A generic e-mail address is a good idea. The problem with putting any e-mail address on a website as plain text is that web crawlers can pick it up and add you to spam mailing lists.

A popular solution to this is to replace the actual text with an image of the text.

For example

<a href="mailto:customer_services&#64;company.com"><img src="images/customer_services_email.gif" /></a>

Where you have an image called customer_services_email.gif in your images folder that is simply an image of your e-mail address.

M4RKM

trcooke... that is just as bad, as spambots actually look at the HTML page, and can still see customer_services@company.com as you have it there..

to protect against spam, use a contact form, where someone has to fill it in, and it invisibly sends it to a mailbox, which then has an autoresponder on, giving the person an email address, if their query isn't dealt with in a normal amount of time.

most big big companies will display an email address, on their website, as they will have a hardware based spam filter, thus deleting everything that is spam on contact, even before it hits the inbox.

My spam filters, just on a basic package of hosting work wonderfully, and i get about 3 - 4 spam a day... ones that slip through.. but i can just add in a new keyword, and then they slowly disappear again..

M

trcooke

Hmm that is true. I've looked around quite a lot for techniques for how to do this and there doesn't seem to be an ideal solution. Web forms look to be the best idea.

You could just display the image without turning it into an anchor I guess.

sixfive

You could display the email address using javascript, as far as I know spambots don't decipher javascript.
example:

<script type="text/javascript">
var beforeat = "person";
var domain = "example.com";
document.write("<" + "a" + " " + "href=" + "mail" + "to:" + beforeat + "&#64;" + domain + ">" + beforeat + "&#64;" + domain + 

"<\/a>");
</script>

Personally, I'd also provide a webform, I'm more inclined to contact a website if I can just fill in some boxes!

John_Gray

Webforms are about the best solution to this problem. However, users often like to know what they have sent, and they don't often get this information.

Most of the simplistic Javascript solutions have probably been cracked long since by spam-harvesting robots, with the possible exception of the complex code derived from EnkoderForm.

alanclarke

www.MailToProtector.com allows you to generate MailTo HTML code in encoded format.

The free version puts an advert on the email the user sends or you can pay US$19.95 for an ad free version.

john_s_2

Personally I think the fear of spam is overrated. I've been running a website for some years now, with an email address on the front page, with no attempt to disguise it from spambots.

I get maybe 10 spam on it a day - mostly from the same two or three organisations. I just hit delete and think no more of it.

Similarly the email address on my work's webpage results in very little spam.

Neither are filtered by the hosts to the best of my knowledge.

ossie1971

john_s wrote: »

Personally I think the fear of spam is overrated. I've been running a website for some years now, with an email address on the front page, with no attempt to disguise it from spambots.

I get maybe 10 spam on it a day - mostly from the same two or three organisations. I just hit delete and think no more of it.

Similarly the email address on my work's webpage results in very little spam.

Neither are filtered by the hosts to the best of my knowledge.

Have to agree with the above, we get very little spam with an email address on every page.

IMO not displaying an email address can make it look as if you have something to hide