Web Design & Spam Email - Related?
First of all I hate spam mail. Hate it. So this blog comes from a fairly passionate place. That being said, what do you think? Can the amount of spam you receive be related to how your website is designed and programmed? The answer may surprise you, and what else may surprise you is this: People (not nice people) have actually taken the time to write programs that crawl the internet looking for email addresses. When those programs or "spam bots" find one, it stores it and is later used to send spam to. So the answer is Yes - your website and be the cause of your spam problems.
Here is what I mean. My guess is that your website includes a contact page, right? A website would not be complete without one, and on that contact page you probably have a phone number, mailing address, fax number, and a way to contact your company electronically. You may provide users an email address like contact@yourwebsite.com or info@yourwebsite.com on your contact page or possibly in the footer of your site (which means it's on every page).
Spam bots will find the email addresses on your contact page and spam you.
Additionally, you may be exposing your employees to spam by having their direct email on your company profile or staff page. Spam bots will find them as well.
Now I'm all for transparency, but unless your protecting yourself against spam as much as possible, you will create unnecessary traffic in your email accounts or email servers and also senseless frustration for you and your employees.
The best advice I can offer you is to do one of the following or both:
1. Supply a single method of contacting your organization by using a Contact Form. IMPORTANT: Spammers will target your forms too so make sure and use a method of validating users such as Captcha.
2. If you feel better about publishing an email address then use this easy javascript encoder that will protect your email address from spam bots.
There is no way to completely protect your organization from spammers, but you can greatly reduce the amount you receive by following these simple steps when building your website.
Bonus tip: If you do get spam DON'T OPEN IT! That just let's spammers know that you are a valid email and they'll double their efforts. Take advantage of the spam filters provided by your email service.