email addresses on web pages

[HumBird]

I've been told that having hot email addresses on a web page is an open invitation to have them harvested by spammers.
We are creating a community listing and want to include email contacts. What's a good way to do this?

Thanks in advance!

[Watdaflip]

Re: email addresses on web pages

The best method is to have a contact form for each email (you can do this more dynamically, but that requires more scripting) which would be used to email someone. The person sending the email includes there own, the only parties that know these email addresses are the owners of the email address' (and you as the site owner of course will know those on your site).

If you don't want to use a form you can either use some javascript to prevent the email from being in plain text in the source code (either by unicode encoding, or dividing the email up into parts) but this does not guarantee that they won't be harvested. It just probably isn't worth it to harvesters as there are easier email address' to get.

You can also make the email addresses into images, but again this isn't foolproof, computers are capable or reading text in images, but again its also probably not worth the time as there are easier ways to harvest email. address'.

Finally I would say you could require a login to view the email addresses, but this again doesn't protect the email address, it only prevents automated software from seeing it if they happen to visit your site. If they have software that will register on your website requiring login to view isn't going to do anything.

The only foolproof way to prevent harvesting is using a well written (that is secure) contact form. The email is never revealed to the entire world, and the only way a users email will be known is if they reply to the email sent to them.