Antispam Tip: Don’t Publish Your Email Address On Your Web Site

I have seen quite a few sites where the designer has put the email address like [email protected] at the bottom to encourage people to contact the business owner. This is a strict no-no. Here’s why…

You see the spammers employ robots (automated software) to scan the web sites on the Internet and locate the email addresses that they can use to send unsolicited offers to people. If you publish your email address openly on your site, this address is going to be harvested for sure and then you can look forward to more spam that you can imagine.

What’s the way out? You can publish your address like info AT domain DOT com and put a note for people to replace AT and DOT with ‘@’ and ‘.’  – easy to figure out for a human being but difficult to identify for the robots.

However the best method is to put a contact form where the visitors can fill their request and contact details. The form processing script can then send a mail to you as well as send an automated thank you response to the visitor.

Are you using any other process to provide a channel for your visitors to contact you? Why don’t you post a comment and share that with us and other fellow readers?