Clever Geek Handbook

Why is "mailto:" considered an indecent way to send email?

I am creating a front-end site. There is a place where a user can send an email to the site owner, which I followed with an anchor tag with href="mailto:..."

. Now the client says we need a way other than mailto

what he says is spam. He also tells me that there are a lot of JavaScript codes that I can use. Who can tell me what the problem is? What is the client talking about? :) How can I solve this problem that I don't even understand?

EDIT: In the end, when I understand what my client wants, I also understand that I need a JavaScript obfuscator email address! Thanks everyone!

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If you post an email address on a website, spammers can use automated scripts to find it. From now on, it will be easy for them to send spam to their email address.

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



Also, if you put an email address on the site, but you are using Javascript to do so, the script that detects the email addresses should now be much more complex as it should be able to execute or at least parse the javascript code.

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because the bot can clean up the html of the site and the email address undergoes the specified process - thus, it is compromised in terms of being on the spam list.



edit: Consider Captcha or similar "human needs" cognitive barriers that are so well established was to prevent disclosure / scraping of post links. GL!

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the problem with mailto:

is that scrapers can be used to "harvest" a "spam mailing list". they are common among email marketers (electronic advertising). Plus, search engines like Google will pick them up as well, making your email address public, easily searchable, flammable.

common methods used today to prevent email spam are contact page and follow / support social sites (since social sites have the ability to block users, spammers won't waste time creating accounts and support each other / follow you).

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Google has an option that you can use. They have reCAPTCHA Mailhide which hides emails from spambots. It presents a link to the reCAPTCHA page that needs to be answered before the address is exposed. Their reCAPTCHA API contains code that you can use on your site.

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The easiest way to prevent an email address from being added to the spam list is to not give it to the user until they unsubscribe from it.

Create a contact form that submits to a simple script that sends you the content of the form to its client (there are a million tutorials on google). You can get spam if the bot fills out the form, but this can be prevented with a suitable Captcha.

When your customer replies to their email, only then does the other party know their email address.

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I would create a custom contact forms page with captcha. This way you don't even need to expose the email address on the page.

Plus, you don't have to rely on people to have email software installed on their computers.

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Mailto has a few of the issues mentioned above, but you can easily fix spam, one.

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

http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/

http://www.mailtoencoder.com/

This way you can use mailto without worrying about spam! He has worked for me ever since.

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