Ronald B Stamets, Web Site Design and Development Services

Hide Your Email Address Form

HOW SPAMMERS GET YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

It used to be that the whois directory was the main supply of email addresses to spammers, but most of the competent domain registrars now have put some restrictive controls on that database. Currently, unless you are using server side validated forms for your emails, you are giving your email address to anyone who wants to use it.

How? By providing a "mailto:" link. All I need to do is to fire up my web search robots and instruct them to index all of the mailto: links they find.... Then sell the results (or give them away for spite). At that point, you may as well trash the email address because once the spammers get your addresses, it only goes downhill.

If you want to add extra form security to block automated form robots, add the field and validation described in the Captchas - Here is an alternative to hard to see images tutorial