How do you present an email address to thwart casual spammers (not spambots)?

Question

Preface: I'm honestly not sure if this should be on StackOverflow, SuperUser or Doctype. If it needs to be on SuperUser please move it. If it needs to be on Doctype please close it and I'll re-post it there.

We all know that putting your email address anywhere on the Internet in any format, be it in plain text or a mailto: link, will cause it to be harvested by a spambot. And there are many questions already on the topic here.

For companies though, spambots are just part of the cost of doing business. So while using something like listing your email address in the form of [someone] [at] [companyname] [dot] [com] may thwart a spam bot, it also makes a potentially paying customer go through just enough hassle to ignore you (and it's possible the user isn't savvy enough to understand what's going on), so you just sort of suck it up and deal with the spam.

However, I've got a client who has a different issue - they have potential customers who will go to several dozen websites, click on the email address, paste in a prepared text and subject (sometimes going so far as to also paste in my client's business name to appear like it's not a prepared text they're sending to everyone). My client then spends time hand-crafting a response, only to never hear from the potential customer again because in this "casual spammer" approach, the vendor that sends back the lowest hard dollar amount in their email pretty much wins (and the nature of my client's business is such that almost without fail the vendor which will quote you a dollar amount without having met you is a big red flag but that's beside the point).

So the client has suggested that while we leave their email on the site in someone@companyname.com format, we don't make it a clickable mailto: link. The thought is that maybe the act of having to select and copy the email address into a message would thwart some of the "mass price shopping" customers. My client's industry does not lend itself to repeat business so they're not likely to ever land these customers anyway and losing them to this approach is ultimately harmless.

I'm skeptical about this but I'm curious if there's any better ideas to thwart "casual" spammers.

To Clarify: I'm not worried about spambots or screen scrapers or anything habitual or automatic. I'm talking about the concept that an actual person goes to dozens of similar websites sending identical emails to each company in order to find the lowest price. These are the customers which would never hire my client and so we're looking for a way to slow or thwart them without turning away people who aren't just spamming as many companies as they can find.

Answer 1

Honestly I don't think this problem has a technical solution. Even if the address is non-clickable, or you have to fill out a form, someone is probably still going to request the quote.

This needs to be solved in the sales process. Whoever answers these emails needs to be able to sense that they are bogus, and reply with a brief request for more information (which will likely go ignored).

Answer 2

To thrawt scrapers, you could inject the email address after the page loads via javascript. However, it doesn't sound like you are as concerned with scrapers as authentic users sending emails. In which case, I do not have an answer for you.

Answer 3

If you have to put an email address on a page, you could build it in-line with JavaScript, in such a way that the text is unrecognisable to a screen scraper, e.g.

document.write("<" + "a hr" + "ef=" + "'ma" + "ilt" + "o:" + address + "'" + ">" + address + "<" + "/" + "a" + ">");

Where you would set the address variable in a similar way.

Answer 4

I tend to not put an e-mail address up. Instead, I provide a contact form that sends an e-mail.