email links or contact form?

[ameliafranzParticipant Post count: 14]

I’m building a web site for my church using Outreach. I’ve used contact forms for the main “contact us” areas, but for the individual email addresses of the various staff, is there a safe way to link directly to those email addresses, without the limitations of the “mailto” HTML method? I remember trying to use that myself in the past, and it doesn’t always work. So I don’t want my users to try to email someone and become frustrated with trying something that doesn’t work. On the other hand, I don’t know that I want to put in a separate contact form for each person–or maybe I should? It just doesn’t look professional, in my opinion, to simply list the staff member’s email as a text with no link to it. Can you give me some guidance here? What is the best option? Thank you! — Amelia

[anitacModerator Post count: 2691]

It’s kinda like a double edge sword. You really just have to play it by ear – trial and error on both methods. I handle a church association website and they’ve never been spammed in their email by showing their email addresses. Not to say that one day they couldn’t. But I’ve found that more hackers are interested in Contact Forms making them more susceptible to spamming or hacking attempts.

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[ameliafranzParticipant Post count: 14]

Thanks, Anitac. I guess I’ll just have to decide whether to take the risk. I didn’t know that contact forms have the same risks, though. Thanks!

[MarcModerator Post count: 66]

You can have the option of the sender selecting from different recipients in a single contact form with Contact Form 7.  They have also resolved the security concerns  well -

http://contactform7.com/selectable-recipient-with-pipes/

You can also encode text email address which reduces the spam address harvesting any email addresses placed in a page/post with an encoder like this one -

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/email-address-encoder/

 

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[ameliafranzParticipant Post count: 14]

Thanks, Marc. I appreciate your help.

[nickthegeekKeymaster Post count: 598]

There is a plugin Obfuscate Email or something like that. It will automatically run obfuscation on email addresses so you can put them in as links without near as much danger of spam.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/obfuscate-email/

It would probably be a lot more popular if anyone knew what “obfuscate” means.

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