Contact Me

I would love to hear from you! Not from spammers though. So if you want to send me an email, please click the little envelope at the bottom of my page again. You know, the one you clicked to get here. Refreshing this page will also work.

Do not send mail to [email protected] because that address does not exist. It's only a decoy to keep the spam robots happy.

Lazy Students

And for all you lazy students out there, who want me to make their homework, please read this page before sending me your request.

Fighting Spam

I really value your feedback. Every webmaster does I suppose. Every experienced webmaster can probably confirm that exposing an e-mail address unprotected on web pages is not a good idea.

In the old days

For years I have resisted the spammers reasonably successful by disguising my e-mail address by a piece of Javascript. However I don't know if that is still an effective way to fight spam anymore because my hidden e-mail address started attracting spam despite of my precautions. I know, this could also be caused by one of my guests being infected by a virus, which scanned his address book or web history and found my e-mail address. There's no way of telling how my address ended up on the spammer's target list.

Disposable e-mail Address

One of the best ways to fight spam is to use a disposable e-mail address. And I think that no other mail provider does a better job at fighting spam than Gmail. So that is going to be my first line of defense, a disposable Gmail address. Once it starts drawing too much spam, I can easily replace it with another one.

I'm Not Satisfied Yet

There is no 100% guarantee that my e-mail address won't be discovered by spammers. Like I said, no matter what I do to protect it, once it's on one of my visitor's computer it's a sitting duck for viruses.
I have been thinking about what would be the best way to protect my e-mail address. Captchas perhaps? No, never, I hate them myself. Ask my guests to answer how much 1 + 1 is, to prove that (s)he's human? That's been done before, and rumour has it that it is no longer effective. And I don't want to make it too difficult for you, after all fighting spam is my problem, I'll have to deal with it.

We're Only Human

And then, one night, while waiting to fall asleep, I had the Eureka moment. Why don't I ask my visitors to click the e-mail icon 3 times before I reveal my e-mail address? That's easy enough for my visitors. So that's what I've done now. I've even added a little decoy address too, which should hopefully satisfy the robots.
So let's see how effective this little trick of mine will be.

Just As A Bonus

And finally the third line of defense is my piece of Javascript which has served me quite well before. On it's own it may not be that effective any more, that's why I use it my 3rd line of defense.
The trick is to hide the mailto: tag and e-mail address by cutting it in pieces, and let a Javascript function glue those pieces together again. A while back I have compared a protected e-mail address with an unprotected one. You can read all about hiding your mailto: tag on this page.