ArtSites Updates

Geoff and I received a great question from Helen Jones:

A friend who just visited my website warned me about getting spam because my email is displayed on the Contact page.

Can you tell me if this is an issue to be concerned about?

This is a great question!

We do some "technical tricks" (behind the scenes) before displaying your email address.

This makes it particularly difficult for email "harvesters" to recognize your email address.

(FYI - email "harvesters" are automated programs that spammers use to find email addresses on websites.)

While this is not 100% foolproof, as best we can tell, these programs cannot "see through" our tricks.

Another thing to consider is that it's almost impossible to keep your email address out of spammers' databases.

The main way that email addresses are harvested is through malware, i.e. "bad" software, that gets installed on various people's computers.

So, for instance, if a friend, who you regularly email, gets a virus on their computer, that virus might send all email addresses from your friend's email program / contact folder to a central place.

Once your email address is in an email database, it then gets sold around and ends up in other spammers' databases.

From a practical perspective, the only way to keep an email address out of spammers' databases is to never use it.

Since that's not very practical, the best strategy is to focus on filtering spam out of your incoming email.

Spam filters have been quite effective in recent years.

Both Geoff and I use Gmail and Gmail is very effective in filtering out spam.

On average, only 1 spam message a day gets through their filters.

And, we have MANY very public email addresses that all get forwarded to our Gmail accounts. ;-)

Based on this, there is very little risk in having your email address on your Contact page, especially since we are taking precautions to protect it.

That said, it still is possible for people go to your website and manually collect your email address.

This is generally too much work / effort for most spammers ;-)

But, if you do feel uncomfortable, you do have the option NOT to display your email address.

To select this option, just follow these steps:

1. Go to your "Contact" tab in your Admin Panel
2. Click on "Do not display email on page". (see red arrow below)
   
   (click to enlarge)
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
4. Click the "Update Contact Information" button to save your changes.

Now, your email address will not be displayed on your Contact page!

Speaking of email addresses, check out our Flashback Friday Post to read about what email addresses you may want to use for a more "professional" brand / look.

And, as always, if you have any more email questions, please just ask! ;-)

Safe emailing! :-)