Is your website exposing you to spam?

Posted by Henrik Madsen on July 4, 2008

Just like the major other search engines send out automated robots to collect information for search results, spammers use ’spambots’ to harvest email addresses. So if your address is exposed on your website - however well-designed it is - you’ll almost certainly attract unsolicited email. And once they’ve got your address, there’s really very little you can do to stem the flow.

Of course you could pay for ISP or even locally-hosted spam filtering software - you probably already do - but it isn’t future-proof, doesn’t always work and in some cases it could even block important emails from potential customers.

The trick is not to expose your email address in the first place - or at least to secure it from all but the most sophisticated spambots - while at the same time making it easy for your visitors to email you from your website.

Check your website now

1) Go to a page on your website where your email address appears

2) From the browser’s menu select ‘View > Page Source’ or similar

3) Search for your email address: ‘mailto:you@yourdomain.com.au’

If you find it in this format your address is completely exposed. You may as well be shouting: ‘Hey spammers, send me more of all your junk!’

The reason you needed to look at the source code of your page, is that that’s what email harvesters read. They don’t ’see’ webpages in the same way as humans, they scan the code and strip out anything that looks like an email address.

So what’s needed is a way to hide the address in the code while at the same time allowing your website visitors to contact you, print it out or copy it down for future reference.

Thankfully this can be achieved in a number of ways - some more secure than others; some easy to implement; others more complex and involved.

How to secure your email address

The simplest answer is get your web designer or developer on the case ASAP. Ask them to ‘obfuscate your email address(es)’ or to integrate a secure contact form on your site.

If you maintain your own site and want to ‘DIY’ then get in touch or leave a comment and I’ll gladly point you to some useful free online resources.

 

Filed Under Email Marketing, Website Design

 

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1 Comment so far
  1. Australia Web Design September 26, 2008 6:51 pm

    I have actually spent a lot of time trying to develop the “best” method for hiding an email address from spam bots. The best mathod turns out to be a combination of JavaScript and CSS, and a PHP function that you have to run on all website content - that automatically cloaks the email addresses.

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