Email address on a website an invitation for spam?

Is it a good or bad idea to post email address on a website? I'm doing a site for a small school and want to allow parents to be able to contact teachers by email.





I remember reading a few years ago that automated spam bots can find your email address if its listed on your website. So my first question is this true or likely to happen?





I know I can set it up so you click on contact button and get a web form to send an email. But I like knowing a persons email so I can send it through either outlook or a web based email service. What's your opinion on publishing email addresses?

Email address on a website an invitation for spam?
I have had some luck with this method but, unfortunately, most of the attempts to defeat email harvesting for spamming has been rendered obsolete.





%26lt;script language="Javascript"%26gt;


var YourName = "you@";


document.write("%26lt;a href=\"mailto:" + YourName + "yourdomain.com\"%26gt;Link Text%26lt;/a%26gt;");


%26lt;/script%26gt;%26lt;/p%26gt;





As I said, it's not guaranteed but, I have had some luck with it. Change you@ to the email address to receive the message. Chang yourdomain.com to whatever your domain is. For example if Betty at school.org was to receive the message the script would look like this:





%26lt;script language="Javascript"%26gt;


var YourName = "Betty@";


document.write("%26lt;a href=\"mailto:" + YourName + "school.org\"%26gt;Email Betty%26lt;/a%26gt;");


%26lt;/script%26gt;%26lt;/p%26gt;
Reply:You can always make it harder for "spiders" to harvest mail addresses by writing them in another format, i.e.


teacher (at) school (dot) edu
Reply:tell me about it, i actually put a company website up and running and then few weeks later we started getting all this spam. i am gonna change the structure and use web forms. make sure you secure your web forms though, because some spammers are using this as a way to SEND spam with an automated program.