Should I display my email address on my website?
A client raised this question the other day. A friend of theirs had taken a look at their website & advised them that they didn’t think having their email address proudly displayed was a good idea as they would get added to “spam lists“.
Update: here are the legal requirements re UK website information; best not hide that email address!
They suggested a contact form instead. That’s fair enough but the website already had a contact form. I certainly do like simple contact forms as it gives a smooth route for people to contact you. But not everyone likes forms (for one thing this is no audit trail).
And I wouldn’t use a contact form instead of displaying your email address ; I would use it as well as; choice is good.
Captcha or be captured?
I’m not a great fan of attempts to obscure your email address or contact forms; techniques such as captcha (fig1) or displaying your email as an image (instead of natural, HTML text) can be counter productive as, in doing so, we’re actually throwing the baby out with the bath water. By that I mean, by trying to make it harder for bogeymen spammers, you’re also making it harder for legitimate punters to contact you. How is that useful?
Fig1: Captcha is a method to test if you are human; used sometimes as part of a contact form submission
Fig2: Another form of testing; but boy can these be hard to decipher!
What are spammers trying to achieve?
Spammers can’t do a lot useful with your email address; they can try and email you junk*, they can try and send fake emails as if it is from your email address but such spoofing is easily (and automatically) detected more often than not.
*Note: if you fall for an email from your long lost Nigerian cousin who wants to give you $1,000,000 but you need to transfer money first then email spam is not the problem; it’s stupidity.
Can they hack into your online banking with it? No.
Can they take over your life in an Invasion of the body snatchers nightmare? No.
And remember there are many other ways they can gain email addresses. In fact, they could just guess. Eg if your domain is ACMEBIZ.NET then do you have any of these email addresses active? Info@, sales@ support@? See, the genie is already out of the bottle.
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM
You’ve also got to bear in mind that email SPAM is just a never ending problem; and one that a contact form or hiding your email address doesn’t really fix (in fact, contact forms can cause more issues than they create).
I use GOOGLE to host jojet.com email and Google are pretty darn good at weeding out spam; we should let them do their job. Using Heath Robinson-esque systems to keep bogeymen spam harvesters at bay can be a red herring.
For more nitty gritty, check out the Wikipedia entry on Email Address harvesting.
Joel
p.s. oh, and can someone tell me the point of splitting your email address up into “jh dot jojet dot com” via a Twitter DM?! Paranoid are we?