How do I hide my E-mail address

[PaulaDawn]

I am creating a web site for my work, a community garden. I do not want my
e-mail right out there, so I was thinking of making it an icon that you can
click and up comes an E-mail of something like that
Is this possible?

 

[Don Schmidt]

You can do it as:

Contact Webmaster

Then highlite Webmaster with the mouse pointer, right click on it, select
Hyperlink and a window will open.

In the window select email in the upper right corner and in the box put your
e-mail address, i.e.,

(e-mail address removed) or your real address if you want to receive mail.

 

[analog]

But anybody can still see the actual email address by just looking at
properties, no? Maybe a freebie email account like hotmail, or some kind of
alias account. My isp includes a freebie alias account or two that forwards to
my main email account.

 

[Don Schmidt]

The way Paula wrote her message I thought she wanted a way to send mail to
her. If she doesn't want a way to have visitors send her mail, don't post an
address.

 

[analog]

It is silly to engage in second guessing, but I assumed she wanted a way to have
email sent to her, but not to have her email address visible. I was merely
pointing out that even if you obscure an email addy by making it a link, anyone
with cursory familiarity with their browser will be able to find out what email
addy the link is pointing to.

Many people are paranoid for no good reason about this, but there are some
legitimate concerns. Whether or not your email addy is visible, if it is on the
web, it will be harvested by spammers. You can expect an order of magnitude or
two increase in spam from having your email addy on a website. Unfortunately,
there is no effective way to deal with this problem. One can regularly change
the account that is used on a website, but that guarantees that folks that have
kept the old addy will not be able to contact you with it. Best thing to do is
grin and bear it...

 

[David Bartosik - MS MVP]

There are two ways to have a visitor contact you. One is thru a "mailto"
link which is simply hyperlinking a graphic or text to your email address
versus a web page, the other is thru a form and the users completed form is
email to you. Publisher supports both of these. In both cases the email
address is in the html code of the page.
If a spammer has a tool to farm web pages reading html code for email
addresses you'd can't stop that.
It's best to just use an address dedicated to that use, an address not used
for anything else.
With something like 5 billion web pages out there and growing fast having
your address harvested isn't really that big a problem imo.

--
David Bartosik - MS MVP
for Publisher help:
www.davidbartosik.com
enter to win Pub 2003:
www.davidbartosik.com/giveaway.aspx

 

[analog]

Depends on how you define "problem". I get 200-300 spam emails each and every
day, and I suspect web presence accounts for most. I view it as a cost of doing
business, but it would be nice not to have to deal with it.

 

[David Bartosik - MS MVP]

I view it as such as well and wish the same. But I routinely switch the
address being used before it reaches a number that high and becomes that
kinda problem.


--
David Bartosik - MS MVP
for Publisher help:
www.davidbartosik.com
enter to win Pub 2003:
www.davidbartosik.com/giveaway.aspx

 

[analog]

Yes, but if you are running a business, you want a long term stable email addy.
Sure you can set any addy to forward to your main account, but customers will
save your email addy, and if you rotate, the one they have may no longer work to
contact you.

 

[JoAnn Paules]

Businesses should use filters. Even more than you and I do as consumers.

 

[analog]

Oh we do. My isp filters, then we filter here. Many still get through.

 

[JoAnn Paules]

Too bad the spammers didn't develop filters intead of the crap they send us.