As a business owner with a website or blog (you do have one don’t you?) your “contact me” email address may be delivering more spam than genuine enquiries.

One of the methods that the nasty spammers use to get the bazillion email addresses on their list is by syphoning off the email address you use on your site.

Now you have probably seen some sites get around the auto-syphoning-bots by spelling out the address like :

leah [at] workingsolo [dot] com [dot] au

It works, BUT it is also:

1. confuses people not up to speed with this type of naming convention
2. removes the convenience of a link
3. looks ugly

There are also people who embed the address in a graphic (also no link), only use contact forms (what if they really want your address), or just don’t care.

The way I have been using of late (and many others do as well) is to have a free webmail address (eg. Gmail, Yahoo) and use that as the public contact email address on the site. The unfortunate thing is that :

1. it is doing absolutely nothing for your branding (one of the reasons you invested in a domain name and wesite in the first place), and
2. it can look cheap and nasty (just the sort of image that every business needs)

There have been a number of ways floating around that uses some tricky programming to get around this. Recently I came across one of the simplest pieces of code to help foil the evil spam-bots.

It uses javascript and requires you to play with the html code on your site.

If you are not comfortable or confident in play with code then just forward this to the person that manages your site or contact me and I will see if I can help.

This happens in 2 parts :

1. insert the following script code between the tags on page that the contact email address appears on.
   
2. Use the following code as your a href link for the addressNote : replace YourName with the part of the email address that comes before the @ and replace YourDomain with your domain name (the part that comes after the @).

This simple piece of code only works with one address on any individual page (not multiple address per page) but should it should be more than enough for most small business owners like you and me.

It won’t make the spam-bots begone forever but it will plug one more hole.