Fighting Spam

If you have a website, you are an open target for SPAM Email. Harvesters, a piece of software, goes out and "grabs" Email addresses off of websites to automatically add them to a SPAM database. The owners of these software packages use this information to resell these Email addresses. Their theory is, "if the Email is publicly available, then it is public domain and free to take."

To some degree, their assumption is correct. It is publicly available but it's made publicly available for use by your customers or potential customers. Like your phone number, it does not mean that you are "asking to be SPAMMED."

So, how do you fight back? First step is to encrypt your Email address on your website. Some people simply replace the "@" sign with its ASCII equivalent - @. So, instead of the source code reading, "mailto:someone@mydomain.com" it would read "mailto:someone@mydomain.com." Now, that has worked for some people, but those darn "harvesters" are constantly updated and may have learned to recognize the @ character. So what's next?

I like to use JavaScript to encode the Email address and the great part is that you don't have to know JavaScript to do it. You simply need to be able to cut and paste. I use the Hiveware Enkoder Form. This is a very easy and free solution. Simply complete the fields in the form with your Email address, what you want the visitor on the page to see and what you want them to see when they put their mouse over the Email link. The form will then automatically generate a JavaScript encoding your Email address. Now, simply copy the entire JavaScript and paste it over the Email code in your web page.

So, instead of the code reading:

<a href="mailto:someone@mydomain.com">Someone@mydomain.com</a>

It will now have a complete JavaScript code with various numbers and characters. Be sure to completely replace the line above, starting from the "<a" and ending with the "</a>" with the newly generated code.

If you didn't design your own site and are not comfortable about doing this, give your web designer a "heads up" about the Hiveware Enkoder Form and ask them to do it for you. They will most likely charge you for their time and the larger your site, the more time it will take to replace all of your Email addresses, but to limit the SPAM, don't you think it's worth it?