The following post is a “cut and paste” from a small newsletter article that we sent out back in March of this year.  Over the Memorial Day weekend, spammers who utilize the backscatter method of sending out mass e-mails were in high-gear and jammed customer inboxes with spam that appeared to be coming from their e-mail accounts.

Hopefully the following post will be of benefit to you and your business (and ultimately, your sanity):

Big No-No: E-Mail Links on Web Sites

A long-time customer of ours has had a web site with a third-party hosting company for a few years now. A couple months ago, this customer decided to allow her employees to utilize email accounts under the umbrella of the company’s domain name. In my book, this was a good decision since emailing employee@yourcompanyname.com projects a more professional image than emailing from a personal AOL or Bellsouth address.

After a couple of weeks, the customer called PCS complaining of the huge amount of spam that they were getting in their inboxes. Since the email addresses still had that “new electron smell,” I did some digging and discovered that the company’s web designer put all of the employee’s email addresses on the company web site.

At face value, posting email addresses on a web site is a good idea because one of the primary reasons to have a web site is to open a dialog with potential prospects and customers. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that once your post an email link on a web site, a spammer’s bot will find it, record it, and use it for nefarious spamming purposes, which ultimately will result your company investing in spam fighting solutions that could possibly hinder communications with visitors even further.

The best way to avoid this pitfall is to have your web designer create a simple form on your site that will not only hide your email addresses from prying bots, but will also allow you the opportunity to ask the visitor questions in order to zero in on the reason why they’re contacting you. Utilizing an intelligently-designed form will also allow for data retention (IE: “recording” the form submission in a database to be retrieved later) and compensate for employee turnover within an organization.