Camouflaging your email address is a MUST DO!
Having your email address exposed for all the world to see may indeed make your business more accessible to your customers. However, you have to consider the fact that your email address will also be easily obtained by people who are doing business themselves.
When that happens, spam galore ensues.
You then find yourself in a dilemma on how to tell your customers your business email address and at the same time protect yourself from receiving unsolicited commercial letters that try to sell you all things crap.
Surely, you want to devote your time in dealing with legitimate customer queries rather than just wasting it in getting rid of spam letters. You may have wondered a couple of times before, “there must be a way to do this.”
Well good news, there is a way to fight spam!
How Spammers Get Your Emails?
The first step is having the understanding on how the spammers get your email. This is simple. Spammers use email harvesting software to fetch email addresses online. These softwares can be installed in a server and can be programmed to crawl webpages 24/7. They work like search engines except that all they gather are unprotected email addresses and save them in a database for bulk emailing.
If you put your business email address on a webpage without protecting it, it wouldn’t be a surprise at all that email harvesters will find it effortlessly.
Obviously, the way to prevent spammers from getting your business email address is to prevent their softwares from ever catching it from any of your webpages.
How To Protect Your Business Email Address From Email Harvesters?
Now that you know how spammers harvest email addresses online, you should be able to craft a strategy that will allow your customers to see your business email address and hide it from email harvesters. Here are some simple and advanced techniques that you can use.
1. Simple Email Cloaking
If you don’t want to bother yourself with all the technical coding involved in hiding your email address, you can use this very simple yet effective technique to fight spam.
Instead of using this:
youremail@example.com,
you can tell your customer to send inquiries to this email:
youremail at example dot com.
Of course you can use variation such as YourEmailAtExampleDatCom. You can play around, changing the font styles or colors to separate your email from the text. Yes, it might look a little ugly but email robots will not be able to recognize it as an email address, and thus ignore it. It’s widely accepted technique around the Internet anyway and even those people without any technical knowledge will know it’s an email address by common sense.
This technique is particularly useful if you’re posting messages to forum sites and blog sites which you have no control over the administration of the site. So if you are frequently participating in forums or discussion sites, always remember to use this technique, if not then get ready to receive spam emails like you wouldn’t believe.
2. Email Cloaking Using HTML Code
If you have full control of the administration of your website, a more advanced technique might be appropriate for you.
This technique will hide your email address by using html code rather than using the actual symbol. If your email address is “abc@myhost.com”, then, you can use “a” in place of “a”, “b” in place of “b”, “@” for the @ symbol and “.” for the period.
Here is how an email address will look like using this cloaking method:
<a href=”mailto:abc@myhost.com”>contact us</a>
The code is still clickable and make sense to the human eye while it hides your email address to the email harvester.
Here is how the text link will look like in the browser: contact us
You can use a to z for a to z. You can even use these html codes for the whole email address if you want.
3. By cloaking your email address using javascript
Using javascript, email robots will find it more difficult to get your email address.
Using the same email address, here is the script:
<script language=javascript>
<!–
var atsign=”@”
var textlink=”contact us”;
var mlink=”mail”;
var tlink=”to:”
var myname=”a”+”b”+”c”
var myhost=”myhost”+”.”+”com”;
document.write(“<a href=”+mlink+tlink+myname+atsign+myhost+”>”+textlink+”</a>”)
//–>
</script>
Notice that I didn’t use the whole word “mail to:” This is simply because email harvester can be programmed to search your pages for this keyword and still capture your email. Instead, I used mlink for “mail” and tlink for “to:” to make sure that we don’t give email harvesters a good clue where the email is hiding.
The disadvantage of using javascript in hiding your email is that some users disable their browser to run javascript and so the script above will not work. Therefore, in order to make everything work for all browsers regardless of whether they have their javascript enabled or disabled, we can modify the script a little bit applying two methods:
<script language=javascript>
<!–
var atsign=”@”
var textlink=”contact us”;
var mlink=”mail”;
var tlink=”to:”
var myname=”a”+”b”+”c”
var myhost=”myhost”+”.”+”com”;
document.write(“<a href=”+mlink+tlink+myname+atsign+myhost+”>”+textlink+”</a>”)
//–>
</script>
<noscript>
<a href=”mailto:abc@myhost.com”>contact us</a>
</noscript>
The section <script>…</script> will work if the javascript is enabled. If the javascript is disabled, the section <noscript>…</noscript> will otherwise appear.
A Little Problem And How To Overcome It
Now that you know how to protect your email address, you must know that it still does not guarantee you 100% protection from spammers.
Your customers, for instance, may wish to recommend you to their friends and relatives. When that happens, there’s no stopping them from sharing your email address via email messages, forums, blogs and sites. And in such cases, it looks like the spammers have the last laugh in the battle.
So what can you do about this? Well, in my opinion as a webmaster for more than 5 years, the best way to protect your business email address from ever receiving a single spam is to never display your business email address at all and the way to do it is to install a dedicated software to handle all your customers inquiries. There are a number of choices, you can either install a simple contact form or install a dedicated help desk support software where all your customers related problem and queries can be handled with full control.
Installing a help desk support software is a must if you’re dealing with a business on the Internet as it will give you added credibility and professionalism but this is beyond the scope of this article and so I urge you to find out other benefits of using help desk software.
When you are involved in an online business, your time is important too. And it is not right when people are spamming you but it is something that you must learn to live by. As to whether spamming will stop or not, only time will tell. But what’s for certain is that there are ways to prevent your precious time from being wasted.
Have you had any problems with email scammers?