The #1 Trick to Increase Your Daily SPAM
The #1 Trick to Increase Your Daily SPAM
Don't you just love SPAM e-Mail?
How much productivity is lost globally, filtering genuine e-mail from the countless, useless, unwanted and sometimes downright offensive e-Mail messages.
What frustrates us as professional web developers is that so many organisations directly invite SPAM by making one of the most common and costly mistakes: Publishing e-mail addresses on websites.
Publishing e-mail addresses on websites is the #1 way to attract SPAM.
It's that simple!
No cheats or gimmicks.
No sneaky fees or subscriptions.
Guaranteed to work every time!
Publishing your e-mail address on your website is about as clever as publishing your credit card number. It's just inviting trouble.
There are countless SPAMbots - simple computer programs that scan the Web looking for e-Mail addresses and adding them to SPAM lists or marketing databases.
And while SPAM might be just one of those things you have to deal with on the Internet, reducing the severity of the problem will always make life easier.
So how can you publish your e-Mail address without leaving it open for Spambots?
Well, there are 3 main methods:
1.) Miscellaneous Teckky Tricks
The end goal is to display an e-Mail address in a readable way to a real
viewer, while hiding the e-Mail address from spambots.
To achieve this, there are a few "tricks" you can use to try to "hide"
your e-Mail address.
One "trick" is to type the e-Mail address backwards, then use CSS to
display it the right way.
A spambot will see 'ua.moc.sserdda@liame-my', but the reader will see
'my-email@address.com.au'.
The difficult part to this trick is correctly writing your e-Mail
address backwards. Did you notice my mistake?
Another "trick" is to break up the e-Mail address with HTML code, which is then hidden using CSS to display the e-Mail address correctly.
And yet another "trick" is to replace the @'s and .'s in an e-Mail
address with AT or DOT.
Because nothing says "professional" like 'my-email AT address DOT com
DOT au'.
These tricks have been around for centuries however (in Internet time),
and spambot developers have become wise to them.
They will easily unpick your "trick" and add you to their spam list.
2.) e-Mail Address Obfuscator
An e-Mail obfuscator is a small javascript that adds your e-Mail address to the page after it has loaded, or unjumbles your e-Mail address so that appears jumbled to spambots but becomes readable when the page is loaded.
Like the "tricks" above, however, this method is becoming outdated as well.
Spambot developers are learning how to find if an obfuscator is being
used, and how to get around them.
This means that obfuscators need to be adjusted semi-regularly to change
how they alter an e-Mail address so it doesn't become predictable.
And now with Google's ability to execute javascript to index websites better, you can bet that it won't be long before spambots can do the same thing.
3.) A Contact form
Really, THE ONLY WAY to save you from the need to publish your e-Mail address on the Web while still allowing people to contact you by e-Mail is to use a Contact form.
The first two methods still leave your e-Mail address wide open for
nefarious types to find with a little bit of effort.
A contact form removes the need to publish an e-Mail address entirely,
making it much more difficult to find.
Using a contact form also allows comes with some advantages for analytics and visitor tracking as well (if you're into that kind of thing).
Conclusion
While just publishing a link to your e-Mail address may save you some
time and appear to be more aesthetic.
It is nothing compared to the pain of deleting SPAM e-Mail every morning
after your e-Mail address ends up on SPAM lists around the globe.
All iASP powered websites come standard with a Contact form module, and
customised versions are one of many options available.
If you're unsure of how to add a Contact form to your iASP powered
website, or you'd like some advice about publishing an e-Mail address, Get in Touch.
Resources:
What's your Opinion? Do you proudly publish your e-Mail address in the open? Let's discuss on our iASP Central Facebook Page, or Get in Touch.
