Protect You’re Self from Email Hell

Use a Contact Form

An email address on your website is an open invitation to spam and junk mail. If you already own or are creating a personnel or business website, you do not want to display your email address on it. Yes, of course you need a way for visitors or potential clients to be able to contact you but by putting your email address on your website, you are opening the door wide open for bots that harvest, use and sell your email address.

 Unless you want to receive dozens of junk and spam emails each day and spend time weeding through them to find legitimate and important  emails from your visitors, clients and customers absolutely avoid putting your email address on your  website like the swine flue.  It does not matter if it is a website visited by a only a few friends or a major ecommerce website, email harvesters and bots do not discriminate and will grab your email address.

The solution is very simple and that is the use of a contact form that allows your visitors to directly communicate with you, with out revealing your email address.  Contact forms can also be used to allow your website to ask survey questions, have opinion polls or allow visitors to join your newsletter.

These days creating a contact form and adding it to your webpage is as simple as cut and paste.  Using a special contact form generator through one of the many sites that offer it free, you simply add your text, and choose a layout. It will generate the code and you just copy it where you want it on your website.

But, not all contact forms are alike. We see many email forms and contact forms that have pretty boxes and a submit button, that were created with an HTML editor such as Frontpage, but all that does is make it look pretty and although It does not show your email visibly its still there to be harvested sitting in the HTML code on the website.   In addition, spammers have created robots that automatically fill out these boxes and hit the submit button over and over again, sending you junk and spam over and over again. In an recent experiment we put up a basic HTML email form as bait and  nothing happened for several months, then ‘BAM” some robot crawling the web found it, share it with others and not only were we getting hundreds of junk emails directly to our email address, but the contact form was being filled out  with offers for pornography and Viagra with hundreds submitted per day. We know of several others who were forced to change their email address because of the same thing. So don’t let that happen to you.

There is a better way. The safest email or contact forms use an intermediary that hosts the contact form or survey form for you, completely hiding your email address  as well as stopping  robots from repeating sending you junk and spam via your own contact form by using advanced counter measure methods.

The best counter measure know today to stop email robots is  called  CAPTCHA,  which is an automatic  challenge – response test that insures the who ever is using the form is a human and not a bot computer.  CAPTCHA is a program that can generate tests that humans can pass but computer programs cant.  For example, humans can read distorted text , but computers cant.  The Contact form will only be processed if the user of the form can pass the simple CAPTCHA test , Humans will pass bot computers will not.  So only use a contact form or email form solution that incorporate the use of a CAPTCHA.

There are several free websites that offer easy to use email forms that incorporate CAPTCHA. The best we have found is EZcontactform.com. You do not need to know html, or have any technical knowledge at all. Their Contact form  wizard will guide you through the process step by step so you can create a contact form which includes all the questions you may need in a matter of minutes.  The site generates all the required  code and you then paste the code onto the appropriate pages of your website.  When someone fills out the Contact form and pass the CAPTCHA , an email copy of your Contact form is immediately sent to you.  Its that simple.   If you are a higher volume website, they charge a nominal fee and offer some more advanced features.

In summary, by using contact forms on your website you can allow your visitors to communicate safely and directly through your website with out the use of emails and protect yourself from Spam and junk mail hell.