| Putting your e-mail contact
out there When you publish a website, you will want
to put your contact information on every page - especially on a
genealogy website since you probably want new cousins to contact
you! But, if you put your e-mail address on your website, the
question is - How do you keep it from being harvested by
spammers and get millions of junk messages? First of all,
don't use your main e-mail account on your website. Use a
secondary e-mail address (hotmail, yahoo, etc). That way,
if the spam gets too bad, it's easy to cancel and change without
notifying all your friends and family that you have a new e-mail
address. Give them your "real" e-mail address and put a
different one on your web pages. NOTE: The e-mail
address you use on your pages does not have to match the e-mail address
you gave to RootsWeb when you requested your account. There's not really a great way to avoid ALL spammers,
because every time someone comes up with one and shares it, the
spammers start trying to figure out a way to get around it and
eventually they do! However, here are a few ideas that
work pretty well for putting your contact information on your
website:
Encode your e-mail
address
There is a way to encode your e-mail address to make it
harder for spammers to harvest, but works just like putting
your e-mail there. The internet has several encoders
available. All you do is input your e-mail address and
it gives you the proper code to copy and paste onto your
page where you want the e-mail link to go. Here are
several e-mail encoder sites:
Advantage:
It makes it a little more difficult to
harvest your address than putting it out there in regular
format.
Problem:
There is no guarantee that encoding
your email address will prevent spam. Robots can be
created that are smart enough to decode the encoded
address.
Use JavaScript to hide it
You can place JavaScript on your webpage to hide your e-mail
address. I've seen several JavaScript samples across
the internet, but I'll just show one here.
[I suggest that you copy and paste so that you don't skip a
space, use wrong slash, etc]
In the header portion of your page, somewhere between the
Head and /Head tags, put the following code:
<script type="text/javascript"> function mailto(domain,user)
{ document.location.href = "mailto:" + user + "@" + domain;
} </script>
Then wherever you want to put an e-mail tag put the
following code:
<a href="javascript:mailto('DOMAIN','USER')">NAME TO
SHOW</a>
Just replace the words in CAPITAL LETTERS with the
appropriate information.
DOMAIN = the portion of your e-mail after the @ sign.
USER = the portion of your e-mail address before the @ sign
NAME TO SHOW = what you want people to see for the e-mail
link (like "Contact Me") Just make
sure that the "Name to show" that you put in isn't your real
e-mail address!
Your e-mail address is put together when needed by the
javascript. The e-mail harvesters won't "see" a normal
e-mail address when they scan your site, so it's harder to
harvest - but not impossible for a smart spammer robot..
Advantage:
It makes it even more difficult to harvest
your address than putting it out there in encoded format.
Problem:
Some people can't run javascript on their
computers or have it turned off, so they'd never see your address.
-
Use an illegal format -
Another way to "fool" spammers is to change the format of
your email address to try to prevent spam harvesting. These
methods replace part(s) of the address with something else and
then the person using the email address must recognize that
the address is invalid and manually correct it before
sending their message You should put a note on your
page that they will have to do so. Many options add spaces into
the address or change non-word pieces into words.
Put a space before and after the @ sign, which the person
must delete before sending::
username @ yourdomain.com
Change the @ sign to AT, which the person must change
before sending:
username AT yourdomain.com
Change the @ to AT and . to DOT, which the
person must change before sending:
username@yourdomain dot com
Change the @ and . which the
person
must change before sending:
username @ yourdomain dot com
Add the words NOSPAM into the address, which the user
must delete before sending:
username@NOSPAMyourdomain.com
Advantage:
Your e-mail address is very difficult to harvest easily -
and spammers look for the easy way.
Problems:
It puts the burden on the person trying to contact you to
make a change in the address to be able to contact you.
In addition, it's much harder to catch all the possible
combinations, but spammers are on to this way of disguising
e-mail addresses, so many have started writing spam robots
that can harvest it many of these ways.
-
Put it on a single page -
Even when using one of the options above, may I
suggest you put your e-mail contact info on just one page?
Then put a link to that page on all your other pages.
Advantages:
Your e-mail is only out there once, so the odds of
a spammer being able to find and de-code your e-mail address
are lessened because it isn't out there in as many places.
The other benefit to only putting it on one page is that you
don't have to change it on a bunch of different pages if you
change e-mail addresses.
Problem:
It's still out there and there is a smaller
potential, but it could be harvested.
-
Ask politely -
There is a meta tag that you can use to mark a webpage to
not be indexed by robots. Insert the following into
the header section of your page:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="noindex,nofollow">
This code tells robots not to index or follow the links on
that page.
Advantage:
It may cut down on the number of robots
that will "find" your address and may work even better if
combined with one of the previous options.
Problems:
Not all robots are polite! Just because
you're asking them not to index it doesn't mean they won't.
Just the nature of spammers in flooding your e-mail with
stuff you don't want should tell you that they're not very
polite.
The polite robots won't index your page either, so your page won't
show on search engines. (The way around this is the
single-page e-mail option above and putting the robots file
on just that page.)
-
Make it a picture -
Probably the most effective way to hide your e-mail
address from spammers is to create an image with the address and then put
the image on the web page. You just display the address in the graphic.
You can create a graphic yourself or
try one of the e-mail graphics sites on the web - one of
which is listed below. However, to be effective, you
can't create a link from the graphic or it defeats the
purpose.
Advantage:
Doing it this way, the spam robots won't be able to de-code
it.
Problems:
User will have to manually open their e-mail
program and type in your address themselves - not the most
friendly option.
Your e-mail address is still visible to the human eye, so
someone could harvest it if they can see it..
Your e-mail address won't be readable by visually-impaired
users who use a voice reader program or users with text-only
browsers.
-
Make it a form -
Creating a feedback form rather than an e-mail link seems to
work well - at least until the spammers figure out how to
get around that one too. By making a contact form that
sends you an email, you can keep your e-mail address hidden
from both the viewer and the spambots. Just make sure
the form is set up correctly to keep your e-mail address
hidden. See my
mailmerge page
for directions and links for doing a mailmerge form on RootsWeb.
-
Eliminate it -
Of course the only really fool-proof way to keep spammers
from harvesting your e-mail address from your webpages is to
not put it out there at all. But, if you're doing a
genealogy website, you definitely want it available to your
visitors so that they can contact you and hopefully help you
find more family!
You'll have to
decide the best way for you to put your contact information
on your website, but hopefully these options will help.
|
