How do you mask your email address ?

[JohnWoods]

I noticed someone somewhere on B-G Forums mentioned that it was easy to mask your email address, I can't find that posting now but do want to know how to do it - can anyone help?

In the past I've put up a website with my email address on it and the amount of junk mail I received increased dramatically. I don't wish that to happen again but do want my email address available in case anyone seeing the site has a connection with the family and wants to get in touch.

John

[Mary Young]

Try googling on email obfuscation
or use this one
http://www.codehouse.com/webmaster_tools/email_obfuscator/
Seems to work, I don't get a lot of spam.

[Neil Wilson]

I use two methods to mask e-mail addresses.
One is using Paint or similar picture program, type in your e-mail address and reduce the size of the picture. Then save it as a *.gif file. Then insert this file into your web pages wherever you require your e-mail address to appear. Advantage is that if you ever change your e-mail address, you only have to change one file.
The other is a similar program as mention before.

[Geoffers]

I noticed someone somewhere on B-G Forums mentioned that it was easy to mask your email address, I can't find that posting now but do want to know how to do it - can anyone help? In the past I've put up a website with my email address on it and the amount of junk mail I received increased dramatically.
I suppose you could just add an 'X' (or anything) at the start of your e-mail address on your website and add a note underneath that anyone wanting to contact you will have to remove that character.

Geoffers
Charlbury, Oxfordshire

[arthurk]

I noticed someone somewhere on B-G Forums mentioned that it was easy to mask your email address, I can't find that posting now but do want to know how to do it - can anyone help?
In the past I've put up a website with my email address on it and the amount of junk mail I received increased dramatically. I don't wish that to happen again but do want my email address available in case anyone seeing the site has a connection with the family and wants to get in touch.
I wrote something about it in this thread (http://www.british-genealogy.com/forums/showthread.php?t=751) ("Web design", post #16). As there are a lot of posts there, I'll repeat my suggestion, which seems to work well:

1. Don't show your email address on the page - all the link should show is "Email me" or "Contact me" or whatever is appropriate.
2. Don't just type your email address in when you create the link, but put it in the source using ASCII code.
3. Have just one page on the site with email addresses, with the "email me" links on other pages pointing to that. This way your email address appears only once on the site rather than dozens of times, so it's less likely to be found by crawlers.

Good luck,
Arthur

[JohnWoods]

Thanks for the replies. 5 replies - 5 options and a new word for my vocubulary (obfuscate)!

Prior to this I was using the method suggested by Geoffers but I always think that looks very unprofessional and wanted something better. I'm going to go for the obfuscation to start with as that seems to work well from the generation viewpoint though I'm sure Terry's does as well. If I'm going to get too paranoid about it I'll go for Neil's suggestion of an image, after all - if you can mask it with a standard program you can decipher it with one. I doubt the crawlers have got that far yet though but the time will come.

Merry Christmas.

John

[Ann.McClean]

I use two methods to mask e-mail addresses.
One is using Paint or similar picture program, type in your e-mail address and reduce the size of the picture. Then save it as a *.gif file. Then insert this file into your web pages wherever you require your e-mail address to appear. Advantage is that if you ever change your e-mail address, you only have to change one file.
The other is a similar program as mention before.

I have also started to use a gif image as an email link due to the upwards of 200-300 or so spam, etc e-mails a day I was getting.

And I must say, it seems to be working!

Cheers, Ann.

[Guy Etchells]

I have never obscured or hidden my email address on my websites or on mailing lists and newsgroups and suffer from very little spam.

Think of it this way if a spammer wants your email address they will get it, as you say if a program can mask an adress it can be unmasked by a program. It is even possible to write a routine to extract an email address from an image file.

I perhaps should mention that I am also totally opposed to hidden email addresses, I think that every user of the internet should have to show their true email address in every mailing they make.
If that was law worldwide there would be no spammers, no virus writers and no grooming of innocents, everyone would be accountable and easilt traced.

That will not happen but if we all display our true addresses then we can mistrust (with reason) those who hide theirs.
Cheers
Guy

[JohnWoods]

Guy,

I agree with all your comments. I would love everyone to display their email addresses and to have email addresses related to the country they live in (i.e. .co.uk, .me.uk etc for Britain) it would make life so much easier. And if we could trust everyone not to misuse published email addresses ....... bliss.

Sadly the world is not like that and one has to accept that certain people will take and abuse any information they can. As such I would like to take the opportunity to reduce that by "hiding" my email address on the page but still leaving the opportunity for the html mailto: function to still work. By using the obfuscate method the mailto opens your favoured mail client and displays my email address.

I have yet to determine whether this might be reducing the spam I receive but I can say that on a previous website I created I had a contact email address that used an email account that was never published elsewhere and within two years I had to change that account as it received so much spam.

Regards

John

[Mark]

Another way is to use a contact form which uses php ... it avoids the necessity of Javascript for the obfuscation, avoids the image which relies on someone precisely copy-typing it and so on. Plenty of hits on Google for "feedback.php" for instance.

Mark