How can I add my email address to my SmugMug site in a way that spammers won't find it?

Question

I'd like to be able to add my email address in various places on my site, but I don't want to be subject to spam-bots and such. What's the best way to put my email address on my SmugMug site to accomplish this?

Answer 1

I prefer the simple challenge to retrieve the email. This keeps bots and spiders away, but makes it simple for humans. I use the free service tinymailto.com. Simply fill out the form, copy the html code, and paste it on your Smugmug page. You can simply paste it into the 'Bio' box on the front page:

Here is how it works for the user:

The 'email' will look like this on your Smugmug site: (see in RED)

When the user clicks on the link, it launches this website, where there is Captia challenge:

And after they enter the challenge correctly, the email is provided. They have both the email and a link to launch their email program:

Answer 2

I'm an empirical kinda guy, so if I were going to try to embed my email address on the web without getting spam, I'd test a variety of methods.

Luckily, someone has already done that for us and published the results. :)

http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-mail-addresses-compared/

I believe you can do all 3 of the absolutely-no-spam-whatsoever approaches using SmugMug, but if I'm wrong, we'd be happy to help remedy that somehow.

Answer 3

You can include an image that contains the email address. This was it's easy for humans to read it and hard on robots.

Answer 4

Here's a fairly simple solution using javascript. Since no SPAM bots I've ever heard of actually run the javascript in your page and look at the resulting page, they don't know what the JS actually puts in the page - only what the raw HTML contains. So, if you insert your email address using javascript, the bots are blind to it.

Wherever you want the email address to go in your page, you put this inline in your HTML page:

<script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
    var s = "jfriend";
    s += "@";
    s += "somewhere." + "com";
    document.write(s);
})();
</script>

You can see an example here: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/Uj97r/

Or, if you prefer a function version that doesn't use document.write() or you want to insert the email address in an existing piece of HTML that you can't change, you can do it like this:

// put this utility in one of your included .js files
function insertEmail(id, first, mid, last) {
    var item = document.getElementById(id);
    if (item) {
        item.innerHTML = first + "@" + mid + "." + last;
    }
}

// put this at the end of the body (after all HTML has loaded)
insertEmail("myEmail", "jfriend", "somewhere", "com");

And, you can see an example of this here: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/peVRP/

The email address is broken up into pieces in both functions so that a straight text scan of the page doesn't see anything that looks like an email address (how most bots do their harvesting).

These solutions have the advantage that the email address ends up in the final visible page as text so it can be copied to the clipboard by the user for use in their email client. You can also put it into a mailto: link if you desire, though mailto: doesn't work with most web-based mail services so it can't be relied upon.

Answer 5

I would recommend using a contact form rather than using an image or showing your email address. There are services such as wufoo (http://wufoo.com/) that allow for the easy creation of online forms to do this task. If you have a blog, there are often tools such as Secure Contact Form (http://www.fastsecurecontactform.com/) for Wordpress that offers the same feature. I then create a link to the corresponding form in my Smugmug site, for me it was easiest to use the easy customizer to insert a custom header that has the link to my contact form.

Answer 6

I use a low-tech solution: I create temporary email addresses that I change once the addresses are picked up by spammers. I end up only needing to change the email address on my pages about once a year.

For example:

foo-1@example.com is the address on my pages and it goes it my inbox.

foo-1@example.com gets picked up by spammers, so I switch the address to foo-2@example.com and filter foo-1@example.com to a spammy folder that I look at infrequently.

Of course, this works on smugmug and any other web page, and is easiest if you own your domain.