Email and Spam

An email address on a web page is a guarantee of eventually increasing spam delivered to that address. This is because "spambots" roam the Internet looking for strings of text that appear to be email addresses. They harvest addresses and add them to databases for use by email spammers.

Putting an email on a web page that is not an active link will not protect that address from being harvested. In order to protect an email it MUST NOT appear in the text or in the markup in the usual format.

1. With the implementation of Groupwise our email addresses are standardized. Rather than post a list of faculty & staff addresses we ask that you only state the convention along with your staff directory. For example:

To email one of our staff members please use the following convention:
firstname.lastname@boiseschools.org

Just be sure that the list you post duplicates the email usernames of your staff (jonnie.doe as opposed to john.doe, for instance).

2. If you must put an email address on a web page we ask that you implement a method of your choosing to protect addresses from spam harvesting. There are several ways to accomplish this:

• Character encoding is the use of entities to replace regular text (example: com becomes &#.99;&#.111;&#.109;) in the html of your web page. Encoded addresses will display and click exactly the same as those written in regular text. Fortunately, you can skip the tedious work of substituting each letter with a character entity because of numerous web sites that will do it for you. My favorite - http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/obfuscator/
  • Just fill in the top 2 boxes (email address and hyperlink prompt, for example: annoy.menot@boiseschools.org and Email Me!)
  • Hit the Create Code button.
  • Click once in the cut-n-paste box and then copy.
  • In the html code of your page, paste exactly where you want the link to appear.
• OR use one of numerous javascripts to display your address as a clickable link while making it impossible for spam harvesters to read the address. Two Javascript examples for you to edit and use.