Web Page Design is Email Administrators’ Business

The other day I receive a frantic call from a client.  I’ve received this call hundreds of times.  All staff is being bombarded with spam from each other.  The client goes on to explain “staff is not sending these spam emails to each other”.  Now he wants to know how all this spam is getting through the spam filter.  While he was talking to me, I surf over to the company web site.  On the “Contact Us” web page 50 to 60 staff names are listed with their email address.  Now I explain to the client that spammers added to their mailing list by peeling off all email addresses listed on the web site.  Additionally, the spammers added valid staff email addresses to the “From” field of each spam email.  So the spam filter allowed the emails to go through.

The scenario above happens often.  Although web page development may not be part of our responsibilities, email administrators should align themselves with company web developers. Web development guidelines should include how company contact information should be published on a web site. Contact forms should always be used, instead of listing  email addresses on a web site.  This does require more web page development time, but cuts spam down dramatically.

A suggested approach is:

• Create generic email group list for each department (i.e. HumanResources@companydomain.com).
• Add the appropriate staff in each department mailing list.
• Develop the web page contact form with a pull menu by department.
• When the form “Submit” button is clicked, email will go to the appropriate person(s) in the department.  No one sees which email address is being used to deliver the form.

So contact forms should always be used on a web site instead of listing direct contact email addresses.  If the site is already in production with email addresses exposed, do whatever is necessary to get the web page development team to replace them with contact forms.  Consider submitting a change management request to the team that controls system modifications.  This is in the company’s best interest to pursue it until contact forms replace email address listings on the web site.