Protecting Your Email Address
Sheffield Web Designer's Idle Thoughts
- Blog: February 2009
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Quite precious things really, email addresses, they're part of your identity. But as soon as you put one on to a website it becomes fair game for the internet low-life out there and you start getting all sorts of useless, even obnoxious, junk in your inbox. What can you do about it?
Scripted email links
The perpetrators of email spam use 'spiders', web programs not unlike search engine crawlers, that wander from site to site 'harvesting' email addresses to pass back to their evil masters. Our first defence therefore is not actually to put your email address on your website but to have a little piece of javascript build it for you in your visitor's browser. Spiders aren't clever enough to execute javascript, not yet anyway, so they don't see an email address and wander off somewhere else. That's a good defence but not perfect. Somewhere, sometime, a human visitor might copy your email address somewhere else where it isn't hidden in javascript and then the spam starts!
Disposable email addresses
All is not lost tho. If you have a website it must be hosted on a webserver and that will provide you with numerous email addresses based on your website's domain - things like info@..., enquiries@... You can usually create and destroy these addresses at will, or your webmaster can, so you can use one for a while and if it starts to get over-run with spam just dump it and use another. You must ensure, of course, that you don't use these disposable addresses yourself. Always reply to genuine enquiries using a permanent email address like yourname@...
Contact forms
Even better is just not to publish any email address at all. Use a contact form instead. That way no-one gets your email address unless you email them. Contact forms also help those who use webmail systems like hotmail or gmail, since they can't use email links. Of course your contact form must be hardened against the internet low-life too or it may be hijacked by spammers who will try to send emails using your web server. Bored, insomniac students also seem to delight in playing with contact forms too but at least they are usually benign and not trying to pinch your server bandwidth to advertise drug or porn sites.
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