I Want To Departments & Agencies
News Events Employment Language

Information Systems Department

Information Management Division - Web Standards
County Of Sonoma › Administrative Support & Fiscal Services › Information Systems › Divisions › Information Management › Web Services › Web Standards and Guidelines › Consistent Content and Style › Email Addresses
Information Management Division - Web Standards

Email Addresses

Webstandards banner 750

Email addresses are easily discovered by robots whether they are exposed on the page or hidden in the source code. This practice allows the email addresses to be harvested and sold to spammers or virus developers. For that reason, we do not recommend publishing email addresses online.

"Contact Us" pages using a standard HTML form is the preferred method to generate emails to County officials and employees. This method eliminates the need to post email addresses directly to the internet which can help prevent automatic email address harvesting for the purposes of spam.

This method also provides a consistent experience for visitors that do not have an email application, or wish to contact the County from a public kiosk or workstation, or simply do not have their computer configured to launch their email client.

For feedback information we recommend directing incoming emails to shared mailboxes. It allows multiple users to monitor and reply to email sent to an email address.