Don’t Let Your Address Get Harvested

Once your email address is on your webpage it is easy for harvesting programs to grab it for use by email marketers, scam merchants, and worse. These unsavory types run programs, sometimes call bots, which collect or harvest your email address. Then you start getting junk mail and spam and it goes downhill from there. One simple solution is to not put your email address on your webpage. That’s very effective, but not very helpful to the visitors at your website that want to get in touch with you. However, there are ways to hide your email address on your webpage.

Here are three suggestions that will help you hide your email address.

You can merely recode your email address with numbered characters - the free E-Cloaker will help on this: http://www.codebrain.com/software/index.html

You can use a javascript method http://www.devwebpro.com/2002/1004.html which will certainly make it harder for your email to be harvested. But you will need a noscript version displaying a graphic of your email address to go with it.

The ultimate is to only use a form on your site, in which your email does not appear in the coding at all, being only within a cgi script on your server. http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/archives/000597.shtml

Please realize that none of these solutions are bullet proof, but they will help lessen the flow of unwanted email. But if you are already on the mailing lists, it’s too late. I suggest you get a new email address and use one of these options to help protect it. Also, NEVER use your personal email address on your church site – always use a different email address for your webmaster email.

If you have a question or something you are struggling with, let me know and I will see if it can be covered in a future newsletter.

See ya,

Bill

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the fine print…

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It would be way cool if you could mention this resource somewhere on your web page! You can link to “Help for Church Webmasters” at http://www.downeychurch.com/HelpForChurchWebmasters.html