WTF… Why?
Just a reminder to *NEVER* put your email address on your website. (or on any site that is indexed, even twitter, stumbleupon, etc.) It might seem a little crazy, but understand that putting an email address (linkable or not) on a searchable website means you’re also allowing it to be “farmed” by spammers and attendant apps to grab and use or even sell your valid email addresses to other spammers who would send you all of that lovely unwanted email.
Even if you protect that email address with code to prevent it from being farmed, (examples below) problems can still arise. If user clicks on an email link it invoke an email application to generate an email… which of course is what you’re looking to do. BUT, it doesn’t always work out that way. You can’t prevent the fact that some folks don’t have their email client (application) or their browser’s security settings configured correctly. There are a multitude of errors that can surface… and if that’s the case why bother? The last thing you should chance is having a potential customer browse away from your site because they can’t contact you.
What to do?
Create a form that sends you a stealth email or updates a database that does the same thing. Your customer can feel comfortable in contacting you and you won’t have your email address snagged.
If for some reason you feel that you MUST put your email address on your site, (sometimes clients insist) then at least protect it.
Here are a couple of examples of ways to protect your email address:
- Just write it out
dave at daveworks dot net (not pretty, but maybe fun – yeah, put people to work figuring it out.)
- HTML work around:
(using hidden html, the code for “@” symbol is “@”)
<a href=”mailto:myname@mydomain.com”>Send me an email</a>
- Javascript work around:
emailAddy=(‘yourname@’ + ’emailserver.com’)
document.write(‘<a href=”mailto:’ + emailAddy + ‘”>’+ emailAddy + ‘</a>’)
There are many more ways to protect your email address (I prefer using php) but for simplicity’s sake I’m just including the aforementioned. If there are many comments requesting more solutions, I’ll post them…. but I want to get ready to watch the Super Bowl right now. =)
Hoping that this article helps eliminate spam in the world for you and yours!
Cheers,
//Dave
Dave, just to be clear – it’s still okay to have the “contact us” button on the website where customers click if they want to email us, right?
Hi Jette…
Absolutely *must* have contact info, but not not the actual email address published on the site. if there are email addresses on the site, as I mentioned within the post, there are some quick fixes. Let me know if you need help.
Thanks for the question,
//D
You should not put your email address on your webpage period. I would use a https://fabform.io contact form — it has anti spam features as well as a forms captcha.