Hiding the church email address from spammers
7 November 2007One purpose of a church website is to allow people to easily contact the church with queries, especially if they have had no previous contact.
We might prefer potential guests to use the phone, but people find email useful simple queries that they can submit anytime. And as churches, we want to encourage a connection every way we can.
When you list the email address on the church website though, there is a problem. This is because, spammers can then see it and add it to their databases. They can do this either manually or more likely in an automated fashion. When a church contact email receives many spam, it becomes harder to deal with and busy staff can mean that false positives are not checked on a regular basis.
A List Apart has an article called Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation, which looks at the history of techniques to fox spammers and what can be done now.
The article particularly looks at the issue of user-friendliness, because adding ‘REMOVE-ME’ to an email address is at best inconvenient for a user. And as churches, we do want to encourage people to contact us as much as possible.
I just wrote an article this morning.
Don’t Contact Me!
The only thing on the church’s website was a phone number. Who wants to call a church office at 3am in the morning, the Friday after thanksgiving?
I built some simple Javascript that takes three arguments (a,b,c) It then concatenates them at runtime to form a mailto anchor tag. Automated scanners would have to run the Javascript on the page to see the assembled name. They just cannot do a brute force download of the page, they have to “run” it.
Dave
Technology has spanned the life of human making it near to impossible without it. Online shopping has pleased us with wonder of ecommerce and credit goes to the perfect ecommerce solution that can create an option for an easy shopping store for you. Click and get! How easy!
Trying to mask your email address is a noble effort, and might result in spammers not being able to harvest your email address … for a while. The sad fact is that no matter how you try to “mask” your email address on a web site, in time spammers will figure out a way to get that email address from your site and start spamming you.
And, if you already are receiving spam at an email address, masking it on a site is not going to stop the spam from coming in to that address.
So, really, it all comes down to having a good spam filter installed on your corprate email system or personal computer. Many webmail providers (i.e., Yahoo!, Google’s Gmail, Hotmail, etc…
are providing spam filtering as well. The trick with filtering is to make sure the right stuff is being filtered - you don’t want spam to make it through, and you don’t want legitimate email being filtered.
And guess what? Spammers are trying to figure out how to get their spam past your filters as well (and eventually will, probably).
Spam is a fact of life that we all will have to deal with. It is obvious that government legislation will not stop it. And as I’ve mentioned, address masking and spam filters, although they do help, will not stop it either.
The ONLY thing that will stop spam is if people ignore it altogether: quit reading it, buying stuff from it, or REPLYING to it! The only reasons spammers keep spamming is because they’re making money off of it. If no one bought products/services as a direct result of a spam message, believe me, they would stop.
Dear beloveth in christ,
May the peace of the lord be with you.
My heart is filled with joy as am writing you this for i have the assurance in my spirit that the lord has guided me to you for a divine purpose.
I am reverend Williams Oboh ;the founder and the general overseer of a pentecostal church that used to be in my country Nigeria befor it was demolished as a result of the tribal war that took place in my state(Anambra state).After this war i took to illness and ever since then my health has not been any better,though my reason for writing you is not to share my pains with you but to inform you of the work which I want you to do on my behalf for the kingdom of God.
After the tribal war in my state I was informed by a lawyer that two late foriegn couples who lived in my country Nigeria for years and were full devoted members of my church left a Will befor they died and in their Will half of their wealth was donated to my church which is no more while the other half was left to all the motherless babies home in my country.
After receiving this informations i knew it was not an easy task for me considering my health and age.I asked the lawyer to sale all the properties and after selling it he was able to realize $7,000,000(four million us dollars).I packaged this fund in consignment and deposited it with a security company in my country and went into prayer with my wife .Asking God to guide me on what to do with this fund.
On my own I thought of giving this fund to any church of my choice in my country for the work of God since I can’t carry on with the work any more but the lord spoke to me in a dream and asked me never to try that for the money is not mine neither am in the position to make that decision.He revealed to me that he will guide me to his true servant who will use this fund to the glory of his name.
I found your address as i was browsing through the christian site and I have the full assurance in my spirit that it was not by coincidence that i have located you but by the spirit of God and I have contacted you to know if you are truelly going to use this fund for the work of God as I have anticipated.
Please if we are truelly in one spirit and you are sure that you will make the right use of this money you contact me back so that the fund will be immediately delivered to you by the security company.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours in christ
Reverend Williams Oboh