Foibles and Little Details Can Really Get You

The other day I was working on the business web site and stopped cold when I got to the e-mail address.

Not what the address would be; that’s already on the business cards that ought to arrive soon.  It’s the whole “fear of spam harvesting” thing.

Ten years or so after creating my first web site (time flies!), I’ve had a ton of experience posting e-mail addresses and having them promptly flooded with spam.  Sometimes it’s weirdly slow.  Sometimes you needn’t do such a thing; the address will get spam eventually because of a dictionary attack, or because someone who has it on their computer gets malware that harvests such information.

Still, I hate to encourage the spammers, and prefer to slow them down.  Thus I’ve long preferred munging e-mail addresses that I post.

Trouble is, that genuinely confuses a surprising number of people, and in business it’s a speedbump to the business goal of having a prospective customer contact you.

So I ended up on a surfing safari that began with trying to identify scripts or other options for making an e-mail address human readable clickable without making it easily harvestable.  I could do a contact form, but those get abused too.  All well and good to have a web contact form on a passworded page as I did for the former big client, which would e-mail me at every possible address, cell phones and all, and Deb for good measure, but before someone can get access to that sort of thing, they need to be a client.

Sigh…

I’ll probably end up either leaving it plain, or using funky character encoding to make it look less like an e-mail address to a bot, and call it good enough.

1. why not an unpassworded contact page?  There has to be some sort of way you can knock back the spam with it… A lot of folks seem to do ok with them.

   Posted by caltechgirl  on  07/12  at  03:12 PM  from 

2. Well, that would require my finding out how or getting a third party something to make a secure form, since I know from firsthand experience what happens if you use an ordinary form on an unpassworded page to allow people to send you e-mail.  After a while you get pounded with spam or otherwise bogus stuff programatically (or not so programatically) entered into them.

   However, that IS what I would want to use for having people submit specific information, etc., so the e-mail address may not need to be given prominence as things progress.

   Posted by Jay  on  07/12  at  05:12 PM  from 
Page 1 of 1 pages

<< Back to main