Home About Us Services Web SPeED Latest Work Articles and More Request a Call Computer Repair
Special Categories
Social Media - Facebook
Features from our Current Clients
How Your Web Site Works
Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc.

Empowering
Small Business
Web sites for
Under $25 a Month

Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc.
Articles and Help for your Web Site

Why are there no e-mail links on any of the sites you design?

Back

 - Why are there no e-mail links on any of the sites you design? -
Click to enlarge image
In years past, web developers put links to email addresses on web sites because there were very few reliable ways to provide an electronic contact link. That link would tell the browsers computer to open the mail program they use (like Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora) and start an e-mail to the person indicated in the link.

Times have drastically changed. There are two very important reasons we no longer encourage this and have not encouraged it for over a decade! (as of 2015)

First and foremost, more and more people are using web based email systems like gMail, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other such free services. The links that we used to use (back in the 90s) do not work with these web mail systems in general so the link becomes pointless.

Now for the important reason!

SPAM is all the unwanted email everyone receives every day that range from mundane subjects to down right vulgar! The people that send SPAM use many tricks-of-the-trade to harvest email addresses. One of the most common ways is with programs that troll web sites on the Internet for openly published email addresses.

Using these programs they can harvest email addresses from millions of sites in a single day! This is added to the lists that are used to send out their SPAM!

About ten years ago we took over a web site with such an openly published email address. The business owner complained of receiving over 80,000 SPAM email a DAY!! Not a mis-type! Eighty THOUSAND SPAM a DAY! Even after nearly ten years of NOT publishing that email address we only managed to get that count down below 2,000 a day.

In response to this, many web masters have turned to form-to-mail forms. Forms that are sent to the site owners e-mail address. This ensures that ANYONE that needs to contact the site owner can do so with a simple click. There is very little that can stop it.

There are many of these form-to-mail scripts available, but many still publish the e-mail address in the HTML that may be hidden from the casual browser, but can still be harvested by web savvy SPAMmers.

Sand Dollar Digital Design has develped their own script that not only keeps your e-mail address from SPAMmers and harvesters, but also provides a stable place for any of your potential visitors to contact you, no matter what type of e-mail system they may use.

Despite these measures, SPAMmers still use automated systems that use web based forms to send out their garbage! As a result, our forms also incorporate heavy duty filters that prevent such attempts. Unfortunately, these SPAMmers find ways to circumvent the built in filters so continual updating of the filters is required. This is why we ask our web site owners to always let us know when they find the web site's contact form being abused. We can update the filters easily and do so between one and four times a week...sometimes even more!

How Your Web Site Works

Back

Social Media - Facebook    How Your Web Site Works    Features from our Current Clients   

Offering quality web services for the Small Business owner

Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc.
With presence in
Destin, Florida
and
573 Madison 1421
Eureka Springs, Arkansas
72632

Call Us At:
(479) 253-6684

Contact Us by Email

Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc. Policies and
Guidelines

Administer This Page
This site is designed and maintained by the team at Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc. ©July 2014
Report abuses and other comments about this site to Sand Dollar Digital Design, Inc.