The first thing I look for whenever I appraise a colleagues work is the presence of a mailto tag. Whilst they are useful and at times necessary so as to be able to provide the user with a quick and easy method of emailling you directly, it is also a very quick way of adding an email address in a SPAM database.
SPAMBots are programs that crawl the web looking for websites with visible email addresses (predominantly email addresses within mailto tags). They literally 'harvest' anything they find: addresses are added to databases, emails are sent, inboxes overflow.
To check whether mailto tags have been included on your website, navigate to a page you now has a visible email address and carry out the following steps:
Internet Explorer users:
- Right Click and choose 'View Source'
- Press Ctrl + F - this will present you with the 'Find' dialog box
- Type in the following:
Firefox users:
- Right Click and choose 'View Page Source'
- Press Ctrl + F - this will present you with the 'Find' dialog box
- Type in the following:
There are a variety of ways of displaying an email address on a website and protecting it at the same time. By not using mailto tags there is still no guarantee that an email address won't be added to a SPAM database: your email address could be manually added to a database by someone looking around your website.