Don’t put it on a Web site!

Spammers are nasty, sneaky, conniving people. They use every tool at their disposal to gather e-mail addresses to spam.

Among the tools in their arsenal are spambots — programs that crawl the web and gather anything that looks like an e-mail address, whether it’s in text or part of a mailto tag. Like this: me@spamsucks.com. Or this: Get Info. (I just made those addresses up. Let’s hope they’re not used by anyone, because they’re sure to be spammed.)

So here’s a tip: if you have a Web site, or your company has a Web site, do not put your e-mail address anywhere on it. Doing so will likely get your e-mail address on spam lists. The amount of spam you get will grow exponentially over time, forcing you to spend more time weeding out the spam you receive than actually reading the legitimate messages.

How then, you ask, can people contact you?

My preferred method is with a contact form, like the one used on this site. Here are some painless ways to install a contact form; one of them should work for you:

• WordPress users can use the WP Contact Form plugin by Ryan Duff to create a quick-and-dirty contact form. Miraz and I discuss this plugin in our book, WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide.
• Web sites on an Apache-compatible server with PHP installed can use MindPalette’s NateMail, a free contact form that works with PHP. I used this for a while — until I switched to WP Contact Form — and liked it. One of its best features is the ability to use a pop-up menu that lists various people to be contacted. Because the e-mail addresses are not in the Web page, they are protected from spambots.
• Your ISP may offer a form tool as part of its services. GoDaddy.com, for example, offers form a form mail feature as part of its hosting packages. You create an HTML form on your Web page, include the proper POST command, and GoDaddy sends form content to the e-mail address you specified in the configuration page.

Keep in mind that even contact forms are not capable of keeping out all spam. Some spambots are designed to look for forms and automatically fill them out with spam messages. One way to cut down on this is with a CAPTCHAs feature in the form software. This forces a user to enter the text characters that appear in a graphic image as part of the form. Most (but sadly, not all) spambots are foiled by this additional step, since they can’t interpret the graphic.

Another method for fooling spambots is to encode your e-mail address so it can’t easily be read by the spambot but can be read by humans or Web browsers. This can be something as simple as me at spamsucks dot com or as complex as using special obfuscation software to do the encoding. Personally, I prefer the forms. I’m sure there must be a spambot out there that can read encoded e-mail addresses. But if this is the only option, go with it.

Just get your e-mail address off your sites now. Every minute you waste can lead to more time wasted sorting through spam.