While it’s a very common practice to make email addresses available to the public, doing so puts your domain and website at risk in several ways. Exposed email addresses are vulnerable to email harvesting, which can result in a bombardment of incoming spam, or worse yet, spammers and hackers can send malicious emails from your own email address, which will land your web domain on Google’s blacklist. Removing a domain from search engine blacklists and email spam lists is a time-consuming (and expensive) process.
But spam and blacklist prevention are not the only reasons you should avoid publishing email addresses on websites or social media. Here’s the full list:
Poor User Experience
Email links do not work on some devices, which forces visitors to copy and paste email addresses into their mail application. Needless to say, this is a hassle, and it also takes users away from the website (the time visitors spend on your website is a major ranking factor for search engines). Given a choice, web users are more likely to use a contact form over an email address, especially if they have to copy and paste it.
Website Security Risks
Making a private email address widely available can be a risk to personal privacy and website security. An email address can be used to retrieve sensitive data (including passwords) from other websites and service providers. It can also give would-be cyber-attackers a head-start for launching a brute-force attack on your website, especially if that email address happens to be associated with a user account on the site.
Email Harvesting
Bots crawl the internet to harvest email addresses and sell them to Marketers and Hackers, who in turn use them to send massive spam campaigns to or from your domain. Email harvesting is a growing menace for internet security experts. People receive around 14.5 billion spam emails every day, which adds to the fact that the system has become a nuisance in the world of cyber security. Learn More
Damage to Domain Reputation
Once your domain earns a reputation for sending spam emails, the majority of outgoing messages sent from the domain going forward will end up in junk mail folders (or blocked entirely from many networks). This happens more frequently than you might imagine, and it is very difficult and expensive to recover from.
Search Engine Blacklisting
If left unchecked, excessive spam from your website domain or IP address can earn it a spot on Google’s blacklist and render it non-existent in search results. Removing a domain from search engine blacklists is also difficult and expensive.
Website Email Best Practices
Web forms are the most common and secure method for allowing users to contact you through your website. Users are familiar with web forms, and based on our experience, it seems to be their preferred method of contact. Website visitors are more likely to submit a form than they are to send an email or even dial a phone number.
Forms also make it possible to route different types of inquiries to different email addresses and track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
In the rare instance that email addresses absolutely must be made public, we can install encryption software to reduce the risk of spam harvesting. This does not prevent your email addresses from being harvested by humans, but it does make it more difficult for bots.