How to avoid spam crawlers? // Contact Form VS Mailto:

Question

I've been advised to stop using the "mailto:" link tag because it is annoying for the user when the email client loads and especially to protect ourselves from spam crawlers that pick up email addresses. A server processed Contact Form was recommended instead.

Are we really protected with Contact Forms?

Which one do you prefer?

Any other way to avoid spam crawlers?

Answer 1

It's better to always use captcha security to differentiate human from a bot/robot.
Both mailto and server side contact form without a captcha security can be used to send chunk mails.

I do receive fake mails from a contact form (on client's website) that has good server side validation but without a captcha.

Sample mail:

from: [e-mail] // valid email pattern

content: advertisement and bunch of text.

Answer 2

It would be more of professional approach and safer to use forms and learn server side programming languages like perl and php. HTML mailto may be OK for feedback on sample webpages on Sololearn but in websites, forms would actually look better. Using mailto would cause your e-mail address to end up in a Spammer's database, hence no respite from spam emails

Answer 3

I suggest to use contact form with captcha, dont use mailto on email, and even use [at] instead od @ at e-mail adress.

Answer 4

Look up how to create and use an anti forgery token. This will help ensure that anyone using a form is genuinely using it from your website/application. Captcha's will help, but there are other less annoying approaches too.

Answer 5

use js to dynamically add mailto value

Answer 6

you can use the contact form, but spamers would can useit for send to you the form with false values. you should use Captcha validation to prevent this. :)

Answer 7

nice