Email Contact Information for
James S. Huggins' Refrigerator Door
Providing email contact information on the web has become a challenge. Web spiders travel the web harvesting mail addresses. Then you receive a wazillion emails of spam offering to make your entire body smaller, parts of your body bigger and to let you make more money than anyone on the planet ever has. So, I've looked for ways to solve this problem.
Reducing Spam
To reduce this spam just a bit, I've adopted a few simple strategies.
- I put my email addresses on this one page in "coded" format. It is easy to decode them if you are
a person, but spiders won't.
- I've set up autoresponders that will email you back if you use the "coded" address.
Munged Email
The email address below includes a part that says "-FIXMe".
To use the email address correctly, just remove the part that says
"-FIXMe"(including the "dash").
So, for example, if the email address were shown as:
Then the correct address to use would be:
For all "up-to-date" email systems, just click, then edit the address in the new email.
This type of listing is referred to as "munged" email. See
catb.org/jargon/html/M/mung.html which
says in definition #3:
In the wake of the
spam epidemics of the 1990s, mung is now commonly used to describe the act of
modifying an email address in a sig block in a way that human beings can readily reverse but that will fool an
address harvester.
Example: johnNOSPAMsmith@isp.net.
Here Is The Email
I used to have lots of specific email addresses. In August 2011, after mother's death and my move to a new web-host, I realized that while that while this complexity was working, it really hadn't added that much site functionality or free time or reduced cost/trouble. So I reduced all the emails to just this one:
Huggins-on-the-Web-2-FIXMe@JamesSHuggins.com
(Don't forget to remove the "-FIXMe" part.)
James S. Huggins
Eclecticist, Author & Professional Speaker
COPPA Cabana
Children's Online Privacy
Protection Act Information Practices
COPPA (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) requires that websites post "prominent links" to a notice of how they collect, use, and/or disclose "personal information" from children.
If you email me you will usually give me your email address (duh!). COPPA considers this "personal information". So, I am posting this notice on this page to comply with that law.
Rather than attempt to obtain parental permission and maintain the wazillions of records required by COPPA, I just don't collect personal data from anyone under 13. If I somehow discover that someone under 13 has written me, I will only respond once as permitted by COPPA and will delete the original email. (I will, however, not apply this standard to personal emails from children under 13 who I personally know.)
For more information on COPPA and this site's COPPA Child Privacy Notice, click here or on the "COPPA Child Privacy" graphic above/right.