One 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.
4 comments
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23 November 2007 at 5:39 pm
EvangelismCoach
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?
6 January 2008 at 4:05 am
Dave Bolt
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
9 January 2008 at 10:47 am
Ecomerce solutions
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!
20 February 2008 at 3:56 pm
Tim Lehrian
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.