Protect Your Email Address The Right Way

If you want to give your blog's readers a way to contact you outside of the comment section, an email address is way better than your cell phone number. But unfortunately, the best way to get more email spam is to post your email address online.

Certain methods of hiding email addresses, such as writing it out in words, including bogus text within the email address that people have to remove by hand, or using Javascript widgets, can cause problems for people with disabilities who are trying to contact you. These methods also fail eventually, because as more people use them, it's increasingly worth it for spammers to figure out how to crack them.

Honestly, I'm not sure there's a perfect answer to this problem. As long as suckers buy things from spammers, it's worth it for spammers to harvest email addresses. These are my suggested two options that you can pursue: take advantage of your blogging software, or make Google deal with it.

Take Advantage of Your Blogging Software

Your blogging tool may offer some specific solutions.

WordPress.com offers a built-in contact form you can easily use in blog posts or on a Page. See How do I make a Contact Form? for instructions. (When I tried it out, it just inserted a form box, but when I typed in it and clicked "Submit" I did get an email with what I had entered. So you may need to type something above it telling your reader what to do.) These forms are protected by Akismet, which in my opinion is amazing.

Self-hosted WordPress bloggers can use one of several plugins for comment forms. The Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form Plugin was built to be accessible.

Movable Type 3.x users can see Creating a Contact Form using MT, which describes a solution for Movable Type 3.x that produces a properly labeled email form if you follow the example. It incorporates Jay Allen's Comment Challenge plugin, a non-visual CAPTCHA, to prevent spam.

That plugin hasn't been updated to work with MT 4.x, so 4.x users should see Create a Contact Form using MT4, which relies on the more-humane-amongst-CAPTCHAs plugin called reCAPTCHA for spam protection. The result of this tutorial is a properly labeled form.

TypePad uses the email address you signed up with as the default email link in your sidebar if you choose Email Link as one of the modules you want to include. This is encoded with Javascript, which as previously mentioned can create accessibility issues. In the help article called "Customizing the 'Email Me' Sidebar Link," they walk through how to use a Notes TypeList to display this link differently in the sidebar. However, they recommend the Hiveware Enkoder for disguising the link with Javascript and again, that creates accessibility issues.

Also note that the TypePad help article called "How can I add a contact form to my weblog?", a web form service called Response-O-Matic is recommended. Response-O-Matic forms are not properly labeled, and thus they can be difficult for people using screen readers to fill out.

Make Google Deal With It

If your blogging tool isn't helping you out, get Gmail.

In my experience, Google's Gmail offers the best spam protection of any major free email service. If you haven't already made the switch, doing so can cut your spam down to almost nothing, even when your email address is all over the web. I get thousands of spam emails a month, but it is a rare day when more than two of them make it into my inbox.

(Is it bad internet citizenship to do this? Probably. But I want the freedom to use my own email address instead of having to skulk around with it to avoid having it scraped.)

To start using Gmail, either let everyone know you're changing your address or forward your existing email accounts to your Gmail account. You can even set up your Gmail account so it looks like you're replying from your other addresses. Or, if you have your own domain, start using Google Apps email for your domain name.

Then you are free to post your email address as you see fit, either in plain text or as a mailto link that starts up the person's email client when the link is clicked.

Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox all have buttons that allow you to create a mailto link easily. In other blogging tools, you can switch into the HTML view of your post and include a link that looks like this:

skyekilaen@gmail.com

It's best to use your email address for the text of the link, rather than a phrase like "email me," so that any visitors (regardless of ability) who have trouble with the link can cut and paste the address into their email program. This is also friendlier to people who are using computers in places where they don't have an email client that can start up when the link is clicked (computer lab, internet cafe, etc.).

What about using a form?

The minute I find an accessible, spam-protected form generator or service, I will update this tutorial and post it to the blog. Contactify is protected by a visual CAPTCHA. ReachBy.com does not properly label its forms. reCAPTCHA mailhide makes you click on a link buried inside a word, the text of which is an ellipsis, and opens a pop-up window where the visitor must solve the reCAPTCHA. None of them meet my criteria.

Sources and Further Reading