Hi, I am thinking of putting an email address on a website I own, but am wondering how to reduce the level of spam it will generate. I will use a separate email address and forward it to my personal email. But how effective is the above strategy that I see on some websites. The deal is I am soliciting service proposals, so I will post a real eMail address on the site (so that my proposal will be taken serious by business minded persons); therefore, I do expect some spam. But, how can I reduce the level of spam?
Don't know if this will work; but try using JavaScript to document.write and base64-decode or otherwise mangle a string? Most crawlers I don't think process JS. e: this might work, var a = 'last'; var b = 'first'; var c = '@'; var d = 'com'; var e = 'domain'; document.getElementById('emailSpan').innerHTML = b+a+c+e+'.'+d; // produces Most "businesses" usually do not have Javascript disabled, so plaintext, copyable email text (not an image, not mangled to the user) would appear.
I would setup a spam filter for your email and have them saved to a spam folder. That way you can fight spam somewhat and make sure that you're not losing important messages at the same time. Putting your email address out there will create some spam so you'll just have to learn to deal with a little.
I found this a few months ago: http://www.actiononline.biz/web/minimize-spam-when-using-the-mailto-link/ Or if your wanting to go down using a contact form then I made a nice post today about how I made my contact form (and how it cuts down on the amount of spam I recieve): http://www.ndedesigns.com/blog/2010/02/contact-forms-and-spam/
Very interesting tip - Thanks! I've always used images but they're not really satisfactory. Sorry to be a bit dim though, how exactly would I insert that into my html? e.g. If I had... <body> <p>email me at: </p> </body> Code (markup): How do I use your code? Cheers
<p>Email me at <span id="emailSpan"></span>.</p> <script type="text/javascript"> var a = 'last'; var b = 'first'; var c = '@'; var d = 'com'; var e = 'domain'; document.getElementById('emailSpan').innerHTML = b+a+c+e+'.'+d; // produces </script>
Superb! Thanks so much for that. I know it may be a bit simple but Javascript has always baffled me! Really appreciated.