Tips for  avoiding the dreaded 'Spam'

If you want to avoid becoming a target for a barrage of 'spam' email from unscrupulous companies  offering  investment opportunities, weight loss schemes, online gambling, etc, you should give serious thought to the consequences of revealing your email address on a website.

Here are three ways of allowing bona fide visitors to your site to email you whilst at the same time making things hard for the 'spambots' - the  rogue programs that trawl the internet and harvest email addresses from web pages containing unprotected 'mailto' links.

Use a contact form instead of an email address link

This is by far the best way. visitors contact you by submitting a message from a web form. They don't even get to know your email address unless you choose to reply to them.

Disguise any email addresses on your web page

A basic way to do this would be to replace any the 'at' sign (@) in any email links on your web site with an image of an 'at' sign. The email address will thus be readable by humans but will confuse automated 'spambot' programs that can only understand text.

An additional step would be to obfuscate (scramble) the html code contained within the mailto link, by using this tool .

Use expendable email addresses

If you lack the knowledge to implement either of the above, then either use an expendable email address which you can ditch and replace with a new one when the spam starts, or.. talk to Chadwick Associates!