University of Nebraska - Lincoln Communications and Information Technology

Stopping Spam -- don't display your e-mail address

After the CIT Information Summer 2004 issue's article on steps to take to stop receiving spam, I received a question with regards to displaying e-mail addresses on Web pages. As the author or manager of a website how do you make it easy for readers to contact you but not easy for a spammer to harvest your e-mail address? Actually, there are several steps you can take that will protect your e-mail address and still make it easy to contact you.

1. Use an organizational e-mail account instead of your personal address. Any UNL college, department, center, program, or faculty or staff organization may use an organizational e-mail alias for contact purposes. If you need an organizational account, go to the IS homepage and click on the “Organizational E-mail Account” link under the E-mail section.

2. Use a comment/response form. You don’t want the organizational account receiving spam so don’t display it on every page — use a form instead. All of your Web pages will link to the one form page. The form page will be the only place you list the e-mail address.

  • For instructions on how to use an e-mail form on the UNL frontier server, please see the CWIS Account Information page.
  • For instructions on how to use an e-mail form on the IANR server, please see CIT Computing’s “Selected Resources for Web Authors” page.
  • For information on creating the form on the Web page in Dreamweaver, please see the program’s Help menu.

3. Don’t put the address in a click-to-email link. Many harvesting programs look for HTML’s HREF MAILTO tag. If you put the e-mail address on the pages as regular text (not linked) it is less likely to be harvested. People visiting your site will need to use cut-and-paste to get the e-mail address into their e-mail program.

Another option is to use JavaScript to disguise the e-mail address and yet have a click-to-email link. The About.com website has an easy-to-use tool that creates the JavaScript code for you. You will find the tool and an explanation in the “Hiding Your Email Address” article in their Create Custom Scripts library. The “A List Apart” website offers a more complex JavaScript solution in the article “Win the SPAM Arms Race”.

~ Pam Peters

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 Last updated December 3, 2004