Do you list contact email addresses on your organization’s website? If you do, chances are you and your coworkers will receive large amounts of unwanted SPAM as a result. It is well known that spammers use automated scripts to harvest email addresses listed on websites. One solution to the problem is to offer an email contact form instead. While this will eliminate some (not all) SPAM, a major downside is many site visitors will not bother to fill out a web form to contact your business. Clicking on an email address is simpler and allows people to use their own familiar email program. So what is a website owner to do?
A better solution is to obfuscate email addresses listed on your site. This involves some clever coding tricks that make email addresses appear normal to humans but unreadable by email harvesting bots. Perishable Press wrote an article entitled Best Method for Email Obfuscation? that outlines some of these tricks. The first, “reverse text direction” trick seems promising.
Ready to remove SPAM from your diet? Ask us to obfuscate your contact email addresses today.
Enjoy this post? Please subscribe to our Email List, Facebook page, or RSS feed.
Warning: Declaration of Social_Walker_Comment::start_lvl(&$output, $depth, $args) should be compatible with Walker_Comment::start_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = Array) in /nfs/c06/h02/mnt/95974/domains/trendmedia.com/html/wp-site/wp-content/plugins/social/lib/social/walker/comment.php on line 0
Warning: Declaration of Social_Walker_Comment::end_lvl(&$output, $depth, $args) should be compatible with Walker_Comment::end_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = Array) in /nfs/c06/h02/mnt/95974/domains/trendmedia.com/html/wp-site/wp-content/plugins/social/lib/social/walker/comment.php on line 0
Does it actually make a difference?
I ask because I’ve had my personal email address—completely unobfuscated—in the footer on every page on my personal websites through the years for about 10 years, and I have never been overwhelmed by spam.
Currently I am at around 10 spam mails per day, and they’re all caught by Google Apps, and it has been quite constant for years.
Hi Morten,
Thanks for the comment. The findings are based on Silvan Mühlemann’s 1.5 year empirical study of email obfuscation techniques. The reverse text direction technique proved to be the most effective blocking 100% of spam while the least effective method resulted in 1,800 spam messages.
I agree with you regarding Google Apps. Google Apps is a great way of “filtering” spam. We use it ourselves and recommend it to customers. This said, not everyone is on Google Apps and no spam filter is 100% perfect. There’s always the chance of false positives. Some companies get hundreds of spam messages per email address per day — a real problem if it’s your company’s primary sales or support email.
Ideally, you use both — a proven obfuscation technique to limit the total number of spam lists your contact addresses are added to, and a filter like Google Apps to filter out the few spam messages that get through.
Brian, is this for real? Good info. Should I make a change to my site?
Hi Kevin,
Definitely. Obfuscation is most effective if you employ it early on.