Why You Should NEVER Display Your E-Mail Address in Your Website

Only a few years ago, it was commonplace to slap your e-mail address on your contact page (and anywhere else on your website). This was standard practice not just with personal websites, but also with business websites (at least the less professional ones).

Today things are different, and I cannot think of a single good reason to follow this practice, that would outweigh the cons.

Below I've listed just a few of the reasons why displaying your e-mail address on a webpage is a bad idea:

Reason 1: displaying your e-mail address on your website is bad because...

It doesn't look professional, and doing so can cost you professional sales. The fact that many of your competitors are probably using contact FORMS on their websites.

A contact form allows you to collect some information from the visitor to your website (usually their contact details, so you can get back to them or answer their query) but shields your e-mail address from the visitor (and the rest of the web).

When the Send or Submit button is pressed, the information entered in sent to whatever e-mail address you specify within the contact form code. This is not something you need to worry about if you have your own web designer. Simply knowing that contact forms are the alternative to showing your e-mail address on your website is enough: the set up can be left to somebody with the technical knowledge to do so.

The added benefit of using a contact form is that the visitor doesn't need to have e-mail software in their own computer (they simply use your contact form). If on the other hand you display your e-mail address, they need to have e-mail software in their computer to e-mail you in the first place (not practical if the person trying to get in touch with you is using a public computer in an Internet cafe).

Reason 2: displaying your e-mail address on your website is bad because...

Anybody and everybody now has access to you. And within those anybody's and somebody's lurk SPAMMERS.

Displaying your e-mail address on your website today is asking for trouble: you're handing over direct access to YOU, to every spammer who comes across it. Get ready to receive more unsolicited e-mail than you know what to do with.

How Spammers harvest e-mail addresses: 1 method

Spammers don't personally browse through every website and look for an e-mail address. Instead, they use software programs that 'crawl' the Internet and look for the @ symbol on a page. Each time the @ symbol is found, the software copies the words in front and behind the @ symbol and stores it. In other words, your e-mail address. Once enough e-mail addresses are harvested, the spammer has a list that he can send unsolicited e-mail to repeatedly, as many times as he or she wants, at the click of a button. And we're talking lists of up to 10,000 addresses, all bombarded with unsolicited e-mails advertising anything from casinos to viagra to 'marketing' and worse.

So what are the alternatives to displaying your e-mail address on your webpage?

The alternatives right now are:

1 - using a contact form

Most professional business websites today use contact forms, so much so that they are now the standard. They are not beyond spamming, but they are certainly a step up in terms of security and privacy from displaying your e-mail address.

2 - using an image of your e-mail address

If you must display your e-mail address on your webpage, then consider using an image to do so. Unlike text, images cannot be 'read' by software programs that crawl the web. Using an image that shows your e-mail address enables you to interact with your visitors the way you had intended, and bypasses the e-mail harvesting problem. However, this is still not considered professional and - if your competitors are using contact forms - then they're setting the standard that visitors to your website expect.