Wednesday, November 01, 2006

I've got mail... honest!

I don't think I'm that hard to find. A search of Google for "David Muir" Jordanhill throws up plenty of possibilities (721 when I tried it a minute ago). At least three of the links on the first page of results display my email address. (The first hit is a very old personal page which I must edit or delete soon... however my official page isn't much more up to date!)

So, I think I'm easy to find but a couple of people recently complained that they didn't know my email address. For the benefit of these people, and anybody else who cares, here it is as a mailto link: d.d.muir. I've also added a mailto to the sidebar (in the EdCompBlog Stuff section) so it should be easy to find from now on.

I thought carefully before putting my email here. I originally typed it in as d.d.muir [at] strath.ac.uk, however I decided this was silly because A) as I said above, it is already displayed on other pages and B) I already get a bucket load of spam anyway! I'd like to ask any techie-types reading this if putting an email address in the form of a mailto link is better than just typing it in? Will spambots find it just as easily? Answers on a comment postcard please.


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The chances are that it will actually make it easier for bots to find it. Mailto links were one of the first things they looked for, and nowadays if a webpage has a mailto link it is almost definitely a real email address compared to some text that happens to have an @ sign in it.

Anonymous said...

Hi David,
So much spam about now. I think once your mail is on one spammers list it ends up in them all.
I sometimes javascript encode emails like this(not sure if this will work in blogger):
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write('<a href="mailto:' + '&#106;&#111;&#104;&#110;&#64;&#115;&#97;&#110;&#100;&#97;&#105;&#103;&#112;&#114;&#105;&#109;&#97;&#114;&#121;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#46;&#117;&#107;' + '">' +'John' + '</a>');
// -->
</script>

but I have no idea if it works, it probably only fools the stupid bots;-)
This online form might be better:
http://automaticlabs.com/products/enkoderform/

David said...

Thanks Stuart and John

Yes... I figured that since the spammers already knew and abused my Strathclyde email I might as well display it in a way that made it easier for "real" people to use. If it makes it easier for spammers too, I can't get much worse off than I am already. :-)

David said...

Nova... I'm shocked at you. Take 100 lines too: "I must not forget the power of Google" :-)