Protecting Your Business Email Address

One issue that often arises when I am designing a new website for a client is how to safely encourage potential customers to email their business.

My immediate advice is that you should never publish either a personal or a business email address on a website. There are many email harvesting programs on the internet (often known as spam-bots) that crawl websites looking for email addresses. Any that are found are added to mailing lists and sold; if you are unlucky enough to have your address on one of these lists you will quickly find yourself receiving a deluge of spam.

Until you have actually had this happen to you this may simply seem like a minor annoyance, however I can tell you from my own experience that this can quickly become a major problem for a business, and can become a serious waste of your time. A few years back I left an email address of mine on a very obscure website and forgot about it. Eventually I was receiving about 30 spam messages a day, at which point I was forced abandon using that email address. Fortunately for me this particular address was one that I very rarely used, and so abandoning it was little loss. If it had been a business or personal one that I used every day it would have been a major headache for me.

The fact is that your business email address is an asset of your business, and needs to be protected. If you have been using it for some time, your customers and suppliers will have it on file and will be using it to contact you. You may have signed up to email newsletters, registered with websites and bought items on-line. If you are forced to stop using your address the problems can easily be foreseen: some of your contacts will read the email that you send them informing them of the change of address, and immediately make the necessary changes to their address book database; many will forget. You will need to re-subscribe to mailing lists, and change your address on all the websites you have registered with. If you are smart you will add an auto-responder to your old email address, giving the new address. This will probably work where the message is being sent to you by an actual person: however you will still need to check your old address on a regular basis to make sure that important messages are not being missed. In short, it will take a lot of your valuable time, and will be a real cost to your business, and you don't ever want to let it happen to you.

So, how do you protect your business address? After all, you will have to give it out sometimes, otherwise there is little point in having one! You want real customers to be able to contact you without difficulty.

The first step, if you have not done this already, is to register a domain for your business. This is so cheap to do that it is worth doing even if you have no immediate plans to set up a website. One of the facilities that usually comes with a domain is the ability to set up email forwarding addresses. Many businesses start off by using a free address such as mybusiness@yahoo.co.uk, or mybusiness@btinternet.com . An email forwarder means that you can carry on using your using your current address. You set up a forwarding address on your new domain, for example contact@mybusiness.com, which will forward all emails sent to it directly to your current address. You respond to the message received this way exactly as you would any other email.

A big advantage of this is that it looks much more professional. However there are other advantages too: you can publicize the forwarding address, while keeping your actual address strictly private. Because email forwarders are easy to create, you can have several, which you can reserve for specific uses. If you find you are getting a lot of spam through a particular forwarder then delete it and start using a different one.

However you want if possible to avoid getting spam even through your forwarding address, as it can still be an annoyance to have to change it, so there are some further methods you can employ. Firstly, avoid using the forwarder info@mybusiness.com. The 'info' name has become so widely used that I think that spammers have become wise to this, and will often send spam addressed to 'info' at a whole list of domains on spec. You will get a certain amount of spam simply by using this address.

If you must post your forwarding address anywhere on the internet, try to disguise it. Spam robots often look out for the '@' part of the address, so disguising this character can be a good way to do this. A particularly neat way to do this is to use HTML entity encoding, so that '@' becomes '@' - the good thing about this is that the character will still appear to human visitors as '@' while spam robots will just see the encoding. This is not foolproof, because in theory spam-bots could be programmed to detect this ruse, but my experience is that in practice they are not, and this is quite a safe way of displaying an email address. Other ways include altering the spelling to contact[at]mybusiness.com, or something similar, which humans will understand as an address; or using javascript to load an email address; which can be very effective but is generally harder to implement.

If you have a website of your own, rather than displaying your email address, a webmail form can be a good and very convenient way for customers to contact you. Any enquiries sent through the form can be routed directly to your business address.

You should also protect your address when registering with websites. Reputable websites will have an explicit privacy policy, and will not pass your information on to third parties without your permission. If you are at all suspicious about a website that you are registering with then make sure that you use a forwarder.

Summary
Your email address is an asset of your business, and needs to be protected.