Currently there is a virus threat which exploits web sites that post e-mail addresses in their pages. Readers and especially webmasters should be warned about this threat. Webmasters should NEVER post any e-mail information on the internet. If they did not, these and other viruses would not be able to harvest e-mail addresses by using search engines. The use of the internet in this manner threatens the very operation of the internet by slowing down key search engines. The current virus threat is Mydoom.M and it is hammering several search engines.
When an e-mail address is posted on a website, spam crawler automated programs crawl the internet and harvest e-mail addresses for the spammers. Even if you hide the e-mail address using javascript, there is no guarantee that spammers will be unable to crawl your hidden e-mail addresses. This is because if a client e-mail program can read the e-mail address, a web crawling program can also be created to read it.
Here are some reasons to use contacts pages.
1. It allows you to have a good deal of control over the e-mail address you use. To change your e-mail address, all you need to do is create a new e-mail account and change the address in the contacts page. All other pages can link to the contact page which prevents you from needing to change any more than one page to change the address.
2. The e-mail address used with the contents page is only stored on the webserver and never sent to the web page visitors internet browser making it impossible for the spammers to the the e-mail address.
3. A contacts page can be set up so even automated robot programs cannot fill out your form to contact you. A contact page can be easily modified to support this.
4. If desired, a contacts page can be easily modified to support sending a note to multiple recipients with a choice of multiple subjects.
To prevent spam, all webmasters should use a contact page to get news postings and to allow readers to contact their staff rather than posting e-mail addresses on their sites. We provide a free contacts page PHP program at
http://www.comptechdoc.org/independent/web/php/contact/
This page will work with a template layout of your site and place its output in the template file. This makes it easy to configure it to match the look of your site.
For more information about how e-mail harvesting viruses are slowing down search engines see the article at
http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.c...articleid=4433 titled Mydoom.M Hammering Search Engines.
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