Never Put Email Addresses on Your Website

Stop Spam

I would strongly advise all website owners to NEVER put email address on their websites.

Putting an email address (linkable or not) on a public website means you are allowing your email to be farmed by spammers to use or sell your email address to other spammers.

Spammers use automated programs called spambots which crawl websites looking for email addresses to add to spam lists. It’s not that they might lift the address on a website, they will lift the address. Once an address has been stolen by spammers there’s no way to get them to “un-steal” it.

Even if you protect that email address with code to prevent it from being farmed, problems can still arise.

The last thing you want is to lose a potential customer because they can’t contact by email so what should you do?

Here are 3 simple ways the I would recommend:

1. Create a Contact Form on your website

Create an email contact form that sends will allow your customer to contact you.

An email contact form will hides your email address from their view. Your customer can then feel comfortable contacting you and you won’t have your email address farmed.

When using this method, it is recommended that you also install a CAPTCHA question to further distract spammers from completing the form.

2. Email Address Munging

If for some reason you feel that you MUST put your email address on your site, then at least protect it by putting your email address on your website with spacing or by spelling out the symbols.

3. Create an Image

Using an image for part or all of your email address is a very effective spammer deterrent. To do this, create an image with the email shown or make an image for the @ sign.