It's a quandary. You want visitors to your site to be able to contact you easily, with a minimum of fuss and bother but if you type your email in clear text anywhere in your html code, clickable or not, you're setting yourself up to be spammed. Referred to as "web crawlers", "web spiders", "robots", whatever you want to call them, they amount to web scanning software which are looking for unprotected email addresses to add to their database so the sleazeball in charge can send you all sorts of delightful email which you neither need nor want.
So what can you do? One of the best ways to get the job done is by using CGI scripts like
FormMail or TFMail. These are software applications which run on your website, protecting your email address by making it unavailable to the spiders and permitting your website visitors to contact you. With CGI scripts the user's email client isn't activated and, if you choose, you can configure the script to allow your site visitors total annonymity.
Installing and configuring a CGI script can be challenging but excellent documentation is included with the scripts and your webhost can probably offer advice and/or assistance with the installation. In fact, assuming your host permits CGI scripts, you may have to contact them to have a CGI bin (folder) installed on your site.
If your host doesn't provide you with CGI access there are a number of sites where you can have a CGI script hosted remotely.
This Google search will show you several such hosts. Since we changed web hosts
wufoo.com has been hosting the contact form on our website. The service is free for up to 25 contacts per month and we've been very happy with it but their lowest priced paid service plan costs more per month than we pay for website hosting so we'll have to find another host if our contact form should ever get real busy.
If CGI scripts are just too intimidating to you, don't despair, they aren't your only option. You can also protect your email address and/or other sensitive information (like your physical address or phone number) with a Javascript. I've used the
Enkoder Form from the nice folks at
Hivelogic for several years now, with excellent results and have read good things about a similar but slightly less sophisticated form offered by
Dynamic Drive.
[8-30-08] Here's another one I found recently:
Syronex
One last way to protect your email address is by displaying it as an image. Simply type your address into any word application (Wordpad is more than adequate), after having selected the font, font size, and text color you prefer, take a
screenshot of the page and save it to your desktop temporarily. Open the screenshot with your image editor of choice, crop out your email address, and save the resulting image in whatever image format you prefer. You can then display the image on your web page so that actual site visitors can read it and jot it down. Just don't give it a name that will compromise you; in other words, don't name the image myaddress@mydomain.com.jpg or give your email address in the alt text (as I saw one fellow do). The spiders don't understand the difference between html and text. They're looking for two words separated by @, followed by a dot and a valid domain designator, like com, org, net, us, biz, etcetera. Whatever they find that meets these simple criteria is added to their database.
This is one area where a very old axiom holds completely true; "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
If you'd like to see a real-time example of the techniques described on this page, view the source of our
contact page.
Happy surfing. Let me know if you found anything useful here and please, feel free to contact me with any questions or additional information you feel should be on this page .
Thanks,
Don Crowder, September 7, 2006