Can you hide from email spam?
In the process of creating my church website multiple times, I have setup our staff and church contact emails numerous ways. The challenge is to set them up in a way that helps you avoid getting spammed.
I use WordPress to create our church site and there are many contact form and email plugins available. If you know the perfect one let me know, but I am currently not using a WordPress plugin. My challenge was to be able to have our entire church staff available in a drop down menu so that people could choose which staff member they would like to email.
I will be honest. When I first setup our staff page I just listed all of the email addresses and let people click to email. That of course invited spambots from every country in the world [particularly Nigeria] to send us trash email. This is not the way to win friends on your church staff. Not that I would know, but… trust me.
I ended up using www.icebrrg.com to create my forms as I am not a coding expert. The only thing I do not like about it is that even though people can choose a staff member to email, the email does not go directly to the person. It sends all of the email to one address [in our case info@websitename.com] and that staff person forwards it on to the right individual.
One tool I have seen to help you avoid email spam is scr.im. This free service hides your email address and does take care of the church email spam problem when posting email online which is especially useful on sites like Facebook and Twitter. It changes the email address to a scr.im email link, but it does work. I would probably not recommend this for your actual church website as it will look strange, but it is an option for you. I am sure there are other services like this as well.
So, what email approaches have you used for your church website and social media?
