free site — protect email

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  kryder500 · Member · Jul 11, 2022 at 9:56 pm

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  I have a free site. On the Contact page, how can I put my email address so that it is safe from bots? thanks.

  WP.com: Yes
  Correct account: Yes

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Jul 12, 2022 at 6:30 am

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  Hi there,

  If you put your email address itself directly on your site, bots will be able to scrape it. There’s no way to prevent an email from being harvested in this way.

  Instead, use a contact form that forwards to your email address. The contact form that comes built into WordPress.com doesn’t reveal your email address anywhere that bots can find it, and additionally all contact form submissions are scanned by the same spam prevention service we use for comments on your site, Akismet, to make sure your inbox doesn’t get flooded by form submissions made by bots.

  https://wordpress.com/en/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/form-block/

  Please let me know if you have any more questions about this.

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  kryder500 · Member · Aug 7, 2022 at 9:36 pm

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  Thanks for your quick reply. It’s taken me awhile to reply. You wrote, ‘The contact form that comes built into WordPress.com doesn’t reveal your email address anywhere that bots can find it.’ I had a contact form up for a couple hours, then wondered about it when I read that bots can scan the html code that creates a website. So, I removed the contact form. Could bots read the contact form’s email address in html? My WordPress contact page currently lists ‘gmail: words in email address.’ Is that a safe or unsafe approach? Thanks, Suzanne

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  fstat · Staff · Aug 8, 2022 at 8:48 am

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  Hi Suzane,

  When using the Contact Form block, your email can’t be found anywhere. Even if someone searches your site’s HTML code. Your email address is on your dashboard, a private area only you have access to.

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  kryder500 · Member · Aug 10, 2022 at 6:48 pm

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  Thanks for your response. I changed to the Contact Form. https://suzannekryder.wordpress.com/contact/