Hide your email address in plain sight
March 20th, 2010
You've just created the latest and greatest of the fifty bazillion sites on the Web. Yours is different, of course, because it contains only important information and sells only useful products. And yes, you want people to be able to contact you–if they can't send you an email, how are they going to ask you questions or order stuff from you? So you put your email address out there and sit back waiting for the orders to come rolling in. Naturally, the first thing that starts rolling in is the SPAM.
Once your email address is public, you're fair game for all the spambots and scrapers to come by and grab that address and put you on their list for every scam and ripoff out there. What started out as good has become evil.
Email Creator – Signature Generator is a service that can help you out with that. Go to their site, enter your email address, and these guys will create a graphic for you that contains that information, but is next to impossible to do anything else with. Your human visitors will see your address and be able to read it and type it into their email client, but the robots can't read it–remember, it's an image, not text–and even the super-smart ones that use OCR won't be able to read it when it's all doctored up. Remember, though, if you use this image as an anchor for a "click here to send an email" link, they're still gonna' grab your address from the underlying code, so don't be tempted there.
A free service, Email Creator – Signature Generator just requires a web browser and a hatred of junk email.
Download Email Creator – Signature Generator
Why not do the same thing using text in (say) Adobe Photoshop or any similar software
Because it takes a second to create it.
How do we know that the EmailCreator site isn’t going to sell the address you give them to encode to the spammers? There’s no “privacy policy” or “terms of use” on this page. Caveat emptor!
Unfortunately the email address it generates doesn’t match the one I inputted. I don’t think that is helpful. It would also be difficult for people who have visual problems to pick up on what the email address is without doing some additional tagging of the graphic.
Something not right, its give you other email addresses, not your own.
>email address it generates doesn’t match
Sorry for inconvenience. There were some problems with server during 2 hours. Now it is OK.
>How do we know that the EmailCreator site isn’t going to sell the address
I assure you that we are not selling emails. It is just seo script. We are seo company, not spammers
hmmm..I normally just replace the @ with a graphic or leave it blank. People “normally” get it