Trying to keep spammers from grabbing your address you may be tempted to use a form instead of an email link. In most cases, this is not a good idea, however.
Spammers use a number of ways to collect addresses for their lists. The most prominent one is having robots travel the Web looking for email addresses. If you have something involving the '@' character on your Web site, you can be sure to see spam soon.
One way to avoid such address harvesting is to use a modified address instead of your working, real one. You can either
The former makes contacting you more cumbersome for legitimate users, and with the latter method you can't be sure some clever spammer robot won't be able to decode it.
Forms to the Rescue
Forms seem to be the ideal solution to the problem. Everybody except the spammers seems to benefit:
- Visitors to your site can easily contact you while
- there is no email address anywhere for spammers to extract.
The Problems with Forms
I think the spammer is not the only loser, however. The Web site visitor is, too. She
- loses the ability to keep track of her communication.
If I send an email, I have a copy in my Sent folder, and I know exactly what I sent, and when. A reply that comes in weeks after the original email can still be put in context easily.
If I submit a question, comment, request or whatever via a web form, I have no record.
A potential reply does not relate to any original email. And while I can search across all my emails, I cannot search form submissions.
Worse even, if the form is not well done, I might not even know if it worked. Some forms report neither success nor error and leave me in a state of limbo: should I submit again, or would that mean bombarding the recipient with emails?
The problem with forms as email replacement is that
- form submissions do not leave a permanent record with the sender and
- replies to form submissions are out of context. Additionally,
- badly coded forms that report neither success nor error are a major nuisance and
- forms lack the easy editing tools of email clients or
- force you to enter certain information, setting the communication barrier a lot higher than email.
When Forms Make Sense
There is an exception to the rule that forms are a bad replacement for email, and this is structured data. Forms make a lot of sense and are almost mandatory if
- you need input to be in a specific form and
- always contain certain essential data.
Even where forms make sense it makes sense to leave a record with the person who submitted the form (this is especially true for feedback, question, request and similar forms):
- A copy of the submitted data should be sent to the user's email address immediately.
This is also another confirmation that the form has indeed work.