Cutting down on Spam Emails?

[jmarshall]

Hi,

I was wondering if it is a better practice to use an email form on a site instead of just listing the email address in an effort to try and cut down on spam emails?

Thanks so much for your input!

Jen

[ray326]

Absolutely.

[felgall]

If you use a contact form with a form2mail script that adds the to address after the form is submitted then the spammers have no way to extract your email address from your web page.

[Mouse77e]

or you could use eCloaker which encripts your address and generates a "mail Me" link

Mouse

[NogDog]

or you could use eCloaker which encripts your address and generates a "mail Me" link

Mouse
Just realize that it's really not very difficult to decode those things. They might stop a few "script kids" from mining your email address, but not anyone who knows what they're doing. An email form with server-side processing will do a much better job of hiding your email address from spammers.

[Mouse77e]

i bow to your superior knowlage and withdaw my comments....

Mouse

[NogDog]

i bow to your superior knowlage and withdaw my comments....

Mouse
LOL - I can't say for sure how likely it is that someone bothers to decode these things. Personally, I wouldn't think it would be worth the effort: the sort of person who goes to the trouble of obfuscating their email address is probably also the sort who uses spam filters and knows better than to open attachments in emails that are at all suspicious. But it definitely would not be all that difficult, seeing as even I figured out how to decode them after puttering about with some PHP code for about 5 minutes. If I can do it, then any real hacker could do it with one hand behind his back. ;)

[felgall]

The spammers send out emails to as many people as possible and will decloak email addresses faster than you can say "decloak" since that gives them another known email address to send to and it only takes 0.0000001% of the recipients to open the email by accident to achieve their desired result from sending out the spam in the first place.