javascript - Why "mailto:" is considered to be a not spam friendly way of sending email? - Stack Overflow

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I am creating the front-end of a site. There is a place where the user can send an e-mail to the site owner, which I have implemented via an anchor tag with href="mailto:...". Now the customer says that we need a way other than mailto, which he says is spam-friendly. He also tells me that there are tons of JavaScript codes that I can use. Who can tell me what the problem is? What is the customer talking about? :) How can I solve this problem that I don't even understand?

EDIT: After all when I understand what my customer wants I understand also that I need a JavaScript email address obfuscator!!! Thanks to all!

I am creating the front-end of a site. There is a place where the user can send an e-mail to the site owner, which I have implemented via an anchor tag with href="mailto:...". Now the customer says that we need a way other than mailto, which he says is spam-friendly. He also tells me that there are tons of JavaScript codes that I can use. Who can tell me what the problem is? What is the customer talking about? :) How can I solve this problem that I don't even understand?

EDIT: After all when I understand what my customer wants I understand also that I need a JavaScript email address obfuscator!!! Thanks to all!

• javascript
• jquery
• email
• frontend
• mailto

Share Improve this question Follow edited Jun 27, 2014 at 22:19 Giao1968 26k1111 gold badges7676 silver badges105105 bronze badges asked Mar 15, 2012 at 21:21 NarekNarek 39.9k8686 gold badges244244 silver badges399399 bronze badges 2

• It sounds like he wants a contact page, where you put in a subject and message and then it sends the email automatically to a hidden email address (ie. hide the email address from spam bots). – Tim Withers Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 21:24
• I was going to ask the samething - perhaps someone thought the question was too remedial for SO ? I think its a valid albeit elementary question :) – Brandt Solovij Commented Mar 15, 2012 at 22:07

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7 Answers 7

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If you put an e-mail address on a website, spammers can use automated scripts to find it. From that time on, it will be easy for them to send spam to the e-mail address.

If you use a form and let a server side script send the mail, the spammer can only abuse that form. You can protect the form using all kinds of methods, amongst which are captchas.

Also, if you do put the e-mail address on the site, but you're using Javascript to do so, the script that detects e-mail addresses now has to be much more plex, because it need to be able to execute or at least parse the javascript code.

because a bot could scrape the html of a site and the email address is exposed to said process - thus it is promised in terms of being on a spam list.

edit: Think Captcha or similar "humanity required" cognitive barriers that are so well established - this was to prevent the spaming / scraping of mailto links. GL !

the problem with mailto: is that web scrapers can be used to "harvest" into a "spam mailing list". these are mon in e-mail marketers (email advertising). also, search engines like Google will also pick them up, making your email a public item, easilty searchable, easily spammable.

mon methods employed today to prevent spamming thru email is a contact page & following/friending in social sites (since social sites have the ability to block users, spammers won't waste time making accounts and keep friending/following you).

Google has an option that you may be able to use. They have reCAPTCHA Mailhide which hides emails from spam bots. It presents a link to a reCAPTCHA page that must be answered before revealing the address. Their reCAPTCHA API contains the code that you may be able to use on your site.

The easiest way to prevent having an email address being added to a spam list is to not give it to the user until they give up theirs.

Make a contact form that submits to a simple script that emails the form contents to your customer (there are a million tutorials on Google). You may still get spam if a bot fills in the form, but that can be prevented with a suitable Captcha.

When your customer replies to an email, only then will the other side know his email address.

I would create a dedicated contactform page with a captcha. That way you don't even have to expose the email address on the page.

Also you don't have to rely on people having mail software installed on their puters.

Mailto has a few problems that are stated above but you can easily fix the spam, one.

There are sites that can encode your link with javascript for you:

http://hivelogic./enkoder/

http://www.mailtoencoder./

This way you can use mailto without worrying about spam! Its worked for me so far.

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