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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.
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