I have a pet peeve. Actually, I have hundreds of them but today I feel like sharing just one of them 
How often do you come across a blog, forum or worse yet, a corporate site and have seen an email address displayed like this:
I’m not talking about where people are working around the rules of a website – for example a dating or auction site. I’m talking about sites where that person controls the content and elects to write their own email address in this fashion for no reason other than to reduce their spam load.
Every time I see this I detest it. It is lazy – it shows the owner of that content would rather have me faff around decoding it (no matter how easy that may be), copying it somewhere to edit it and generally wasting my time. The likelihood that I just don’t bother contacting them is higher than if it was a simple copy & paste operation or mailto: link.
Anti-spam tools are pretty good
I’ve had my email address in full naked glory splattered all over the internet. I want to get feedback from people and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Surprisingly my inbox is not chock full of spam like it might have been in 1998 because the quality of anti-spam scanners has improved remarkably since then. Sure, my junk mail folder gets filled with advice on pleasing my lover and making easy money but that’s the job of the junk mail folder – to handle the crap flow. I’d rather have software doing the heavy lifting than pushing additional load on people who want to get in touch.
Be accessible to everyone
Obviously email obfuscation is more common with technical folks. Consider an ISV website – many of the site owners assume their site users are technical, however this is not always the case. Take the Mindscape site for example – our users are technical but most of the people emailing us are management or accounts people and are not technical at all. We want to make darn sure that the people who pay the bills and who make the final purchasing decisions can get in touch easily with as little friction as possible.
Look professional
Chances are that if you’re geeky enough to want to obfuscate your email address you’re also geeky enough to write a basic online form. If you’re still concerned with all the spam you might get then build a nice form that allows people to email you without exposing your email address. Ensure that you make it clear you’ll reply quickly and word the page in a manner that informs the user that it is not an input box to oblivion. This is a much more professional looking solution than lazily obfuscating your email address.
Looking professional is important – it’s about building trust. Take Ayende’s blog for example. Ayende writes a heap of great blog posts and has built a solid following with .NET developers. On his blog he lists his cellphone number and email address prominently. When you visit his site, you see how open the person is it immediately which makes them feel more trustworthy and increases their credibility
Boosting trust and credibility is hard in the online world – consider this approach for your own website.
If you’d like to comment either drop one below or email me: jd@mindscape.co.nz
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Hi! That are exactly the same thoughts i have about publishing my E-Mail address. It is just a lot more friendlier for the user to just click on that link than to manually open the E-Mail app, pasting the address and then correcting it to be valid.
However you have to have good anti-spam defense set up anyways otherwise you are lost in todays world.
Nice post!
The biggest obfuscation is done by Facebook.They change it into an image!!
I actually like to make it slightly more difficult to contact me. I just use a picture of the email address. Not only does it cut down on spam, it also cuts down email to people who really want to contact me. If typing in the address is too much work – well, then, it probably wasn’t important enough.
Here, here!
I’ve been of the same opinion for a few years now. It is almost humorous how many times folks have asked me in wide-eyed awe questions like “don’t you worry about spam?” or “don’t you worry about your privacy?”
And I very much believe that a real name associated with what one posts on the Internet, and a contact address, adds a non-trivial degree of credibility.
Great post.
Cheers,
Stu Thompson
stu@thompson.name
Agreed. If you don’t have a full blown contact form on ur site, atleast you should have the email ID mailto: linked so that the visitor can right click -> copy email address & put that in their gmail or desktop email program or whatever.
Why loose the slight chance that might have crossed the visitor’s mind to contact you by having a difficult to understand/find contact info.
I agree. More annoying yet is a website I use frequently which even encodes emails entered into private messages between users – the messages are never displayed publicly, never indexed by search engines, yet when you send someone a message any address is replaced with name [!at] example.com. It’s a high example of pointless and lazy programming.
I am not saying I do not get spam, but obfuscating your email of some sort may slow down spam. I find the better approach is to use JS obfuscation, where the email address is still quite visible yet crawlers would have a hard time finding it.
I couldn’t agree more. My primary email address has been publicly displayed my site for years, unobfuscated. I spend very little time worrying about or dealing with automated junk mail.
Using such an arbitrary “test” as a gating mechanism is misguided at best.
Good points. For most audiences, the “name at domain dot com” format is totally inappropriate. I also wouldn’t underestimate the ability of spambots to extract email addresses that have undergone such lame obfuscation.
I wrote PrivateDaddy for exactly this reason: providing an unobtrusive, graceful degradation, one liner PHP solution that lets you have your mailto links while leaving them really safe from spam bots.
There’s also a WordPress add-on, and it’s all entirely Free.
The rest is at http://www.privatedaddy.com/
Hope you don’t mind the shameless though highly relevant plug
Nadav
Dilligaff? If you consider yourself too go(o)d for it, you’re not worth _my_ time.