Spam Email Problems?

Things you can do to reduce your spam email

Any time you place your email on a public web page, you become the potential victim of spammers and spam email programs. There are some steps that can be done in order for the address to be harder to scrape,

• don't put your email address on public web pages (keep in mind that public forums like yahoo and google groups are archived online and are public by default)
• use javascript or hexadecimal code to obfuscate your email address
• use an image to show the email

Unfortunately many spammers have realized it's cheaper and more effective to pay actual humans in poor 3rd world countries to scape emails with their own eyes, than to write programs to scrape the emails programatically. This means that anything visible to human eyes, even bob - at - mydomain - dot - com, will go into their collection!

Disposable email addresses

Because of this I recommend the concept of a 'disposable' public address. Use the disposable email address when you have to have it on a public web space and set up that email account to forward to your real address. Then swap the publicly viewable address out if it gets too much spam. This comes with its own set of obvious disadvantages. Once you swap out your email, you may loose valuable correspondence.

Online email forms

The only good way around this is to have your web developer make you an online email contact form, that sends you an email without revealing your email address. This is more time consuming for the developer than the previous methods, but much more effective in limiting spam. Bear in mind that an online email form can also be abused. In fact if done poorly they can be used by savvy spammers to actually use YOUR web host to send out thousands of spam messages a day!