Spam, e-mail addresses and contact forms: are you making these usability mistakes?
Traditionally the main source of e-mail addresses for spammers has been from crawling web pages in the same way as search engines. Addresses published on the web are likely to receive more spam than those that are not.
To reduce this problem, two methods been used to avoid publishing e-mail addresses: hiding the published address, or replacing addresses with a contact form. Here we explain how both make poor choices for the usability of your website.
Hiding addresses
This is often done by writing the e-mail addresses in a form that only a human could understand; perhaps james@freecharity.REMOVEMEorg.uk, or james (at) freecharity (dot) org (dot) uk, or as an image embedded in a page. These address can’t easily be picked out as a valid e-mail address by automated software.
More recent schemes use JavaScript to hide the address in the source of the web page but reassemble it when executed in a web browser. This works as long spammers don’t execute JavaScript in the pages they crawl and we’ve no reason to suspect that some are not already doing so. These schemes don’t account for readers who can’t run the embedded script and so fails to meet the most basic level of conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Your readers want to click on a link and start writing an e-mail straight away and you’ve purposely stoped them from doing so. Someone impulsively contacting you might be put off, another person might not understand your scheme.
Contact forms
Replacing e-mail addresses with server side scripts and HTML contact forms can provide a means for people to contact you without publishing an address. This seems ideal.
Unfortunately, most of your readers already have a familiar, comfortable and functional environment for sending communications – their e-mail software. It allows them to record, sort, archive and search through past communications, manage attachments, addresses and presenting all this in a format tailored to their individual accessibility requirements. By forcing the use of contact forms you take this away from your readers.
(Not that web forms don’t have their place. They’re great for ensuring that people send you precisely the information you require from them).
Summary
Publish your addresses and deal with spam as it arrives. Spammers use other sources of e-mail addresses over which you have no control. The limited reduction in spam that these methods provide comes at a burden upon your legitimate readers. You should design your website to be usable for them; not convenient for yourself.
What about using the script and techniques I described here
http://perassi.org/2007/09/24/an-accessible-email-cloaking-technique/
?
Thank you.
It’s a good idea but if your browser can display your address correctly – I’m sure the spammers can work it out.
I also use contact form in my website which I think is the best solution to hide e-mail address.
Contact forms have their place but I don’t feel that they are a replacement for e-mail.
James: I think it mostly works. Spammers don’t spend much time on not-trivial parsing.
otogazt’s a good idea but if your browser can display your address correctly – I’m sure the spammers can work it out.
I think It’s a good idea but if your browser can display your address correctly – I’m sure the spammers can work it out.
So you’re basically saying that a mailto: link is better than a contact form?
Are you serious?
Think about this:
The user clicks a link saying “Contact Us”
Option 1 – they’re taken to an online contact form which shows them which information is required and which is optional. This removes the possibility of the user forgetting a piece of important information, which would then require the site owner to email them back requesting it.
Plus, perhaps the user has a different email which they use when contacting website. Here they can choose to enter it.
For business purposes the email can easily be stored in a database for future data analysis.
Option 2 – in the worst case, the link isn’t identified as a mailto: link and the user gets a not so pleasant surprise when they click the link and their mail client opens. The same is true of other links that don’t identify themselves correctly, such as pdf’s and Word documents.
Any hyperlinks which open an external application should make this clear to the user, without the user having to mouseover the link to check the filename in the link.
As in the article, forms are useful when you require particular pieces of information from your user. What they’re not so good at is generic communications.
If the action of a hyperlink isn’t clear to the user then I suspect that the design of the site isn’t clear; not that mailto: URLs are inherently bad.
I agree with Dunc, there is not an accessibility problem with the contact form, it is different from their e-mail, but a contact form is not for sending an e-mail, it is for getting information, just because it happens to send an e-mail doesn’t make it an e-mail.
The contact form is far and away the best issue to save you from receiving spam if you are doing it correctly, as it all has to come through the contact form. Spammers still try to spam the contact form, but since they think it’s a blog, then they do blog spamming, which includes lots of links, which is very easily filtered.
The bad behavior plugin kepps bots away from the site pages. So your idea of using a real mailto link becomes fesable. Without that the mailto link is an invitation for spam on steroids.
I agree with Matt and Dunc, putting your email address in plain sight on a website or inside a Word, text, or PDF document is an easy way to invite automated spam; and it’s extremely difficult to produce rules to filter out the resultant spam.
Contact forms are easy to create and they can be customised to suit the situation needed, everyone understands how to use them, they’re not fazed by having to use them.
There is always a trade-off between usability, convenience, and resources, but in this case, the Contact Form wins overwhelmingly.