Friday, May 24, 2013

Hide Your Email Address From Spammers With Contact Forms

Every website should give visitors a way of contacting the person who runs it (that's you, right?). But if you place your email address anywhere on your site sooner or later it will fall into the hands of spammers and you will end up with a lot of unwanted email, and I mean a lot.

A simple solution is to use a contact form instead. Contact forms give visitors a way to contact you without revealing your email address. Though it won't stop unwanted email completely, it will prevent your email address from ending up on lists that are traded or sold to marketers who send junk email in bulk.

An actual contact form is easy to make with HTML form tags however to get it to work requires a script which is beyond the capabilities of HTML code. But not to worry, there are online form services that will make and process forms for you. You simply choose the elements you want to include on your form such as a message text box, and the code is automatically generated for you to copy and paste into your webpage. When someone uses the form to contact you, their message is sent to the email address you specified when you signed up for the service.

A free service I can personally recommend because I use it for my contact forms is www.emailmeform.com Of course there are others, both free and paid, do a search to find the one that's best for you and give your inbox a break from spam. If you would like to learn how to construct forms see the tutorial Tags For Making HTML Forms.