Email and the Web

Connecting your email to your website.

Choosing an Email Address

There are a couple of good types of email addresses to use on your website or business cards.

Personal Email

Put this on your business cards and use it when you are the only person who should get an email directly. Ideally, this should be short enough to type easily and fit nicely on your card.

Your first initial followed by your last name @example.com is the most common format. Adding a middle initial is helpful in large organizations. If you have a very long last name, consider cutting it down to 6-8 characters (some systems will only allow 8 characters before the @ total).

Mailing Lists

Setting your Contact form to go to Contact@example.com, info@example.com, etc. makes the email address easy to remember and allows contacts to be shared by multiple people.

If you would like multiple people to split the email checking duties, setting up those accounts as a single shared mailbox can be helpful. By using IMAP, each person can mark what emails they have read.

Alternatively, setting up a shared address as a redirect is great if you want everyone to get the email individually. For example, info@example.com might go to you, your partner, and your intern. If you wanted to change the email address or add/remove people from the list, it is much easier than setting up new accounts.

Avoiding Spam

Allowing your potential customers to Contact you via your website, also lets spammers in. Fortunately there are some techniques that can reduce the amount of junk mail you get.

Use a contact form

Although bots are still capable of submitting forms, using a Contact form instead of just listing your email address gives you a chance to weed out some of the junk early on. This process is fairly technical, and needs to be done by the person who administers your website.

A CAPTCHA, which is a picture with words in it that the user must assimilate to continue, can have some success at eliminating bots but also tends to be frustrating for real users. Some other approaches at spam detection try to trick bots into doing something that real users wouldn’t, or otherwise flag strange activity.

Hide the email address

If you are set on putting your email address directly on a webpage, you can still try to make it more difficult for bots to find.

The simplest way is to explain the email address, rather than spell it out. For example, “info AT example DOT com”, which a live person can figure out fairly easily. Just keep in mind that smart bots will still figure this out, particularly if you use a fairly common format like this.

An advanced approach uses javascript (typically encoding the email address in base 64 and then using javascript to unscramble it in the page), and also put the spelled-out or image version inside of a NOSCRIPT tag. This doesn’t require any extra work for visitors if they have javascript enabled, but still works even if they don’t.

Use a good email client with spam detection

Thunderbird, Apple’s Mail.app, GMail, and a number of other email Clients have good spam detection built in.

There are also a number of server-side spam detection options. Although server-side detection requires less work overall on your part, it can be difficult to know that a message has been flagged as spam.