If you write a blog you might be tempted at certain times to ask people to contact you by e-mail for a certain service or to take advantage of a particular promotion. In doing so, you’ll give your e-mail address and hyperlink it so that it becomes easier for those wanting to take advantage of your offer to do so. I’d like to encourage you, before you do so, don’t!
I admire your willingness to provide useful and efficient service, and if you like getting spammed then go right ahead with your plan. If not, then I have some alternative suggestions for you.
Spammers and email marketers have been known to send their robots out to crawl hyperlinks in cyberspace. When they find a mail link, it’s food for their spambots. You’ll get lots of unwanted mail. I assure you. But you don’t have to do it that way.
Instead, list your email without hyperlinking it. That’s one alternative, though not the best choice. Spambots won’t be able to crawl it since it isn’t a link, but they can still read the content and make note of it. Then some human somewhere in a remote part of the world will manually enter it into their robot for future spam reference.
Another method that some people use is to list their email with a little bit of obscurity such as this:
brick at marketing dot com
Bots can read this text but don’t recognize it as an email address, so it takes care of the problem listed above where a human manually enters your address into a spambot’s files. But humans can still make this out to be an email address. If a person is a spammer they can still add your email to their list and you’ll still get a little bit of spam (though not as much).
The best way to combat spam on your blog is to add a page with a contact form on it. You can get the code for creating content forms just about anywhere on line. There are even some services that will create a form for you. But by including a contact form that people have to fill out, with a CAPTCHA included, you’ll go a long way to cut down spam. Humans can still get past the CAPTCHA but you’ll get a lot less spam with a contact form. Alternatively, you can put your contact form on your website and link to it from the blog. Either way is fine as long as you aren’t giving away your email address to the spammers.
