Protect your Email on Websites

You made a cool website. You published your active favorite contact email address on the contact webpage (with a nice logo maybe). Suddenly over weeks, your favorite email id has tons of spam mail in the inbox.

Why? Your email is tracked by special search bots that index web pages and pick up listed email addresses there. Then spammers may use these to send you unwanted emails.

How can you avoid it

A. Do not list your favorite email address on webpages as you usually do.

B. Use forms for feedback which submit via cgi scripts. Many of us use free hosting like Geocities.com. These forms are better for receiving feedback and very convenient for surfers. So these forms come in handy. Also they protect your email by not revealing it in the page source code. Read here Why Email links are Bad for Feedback.

C. Use an image to display the email address. Bots cant see your email address from the images source code, so they cant detect your email ID. This will prevent detection of your email address for fraudulent purposes. Beware, if you use the ‘alt’ tag to label your email address, then the whole exercise is in vain. If you really need to add alternate text to the image as a necessity - then change the text to something else.

Now how do you make this images fast?
If you can customize on a neat small image on your image editor like Adobe Photoshop, then its great. But if need the image fast and can do with less customization, then E-Mail Icon Generator is for you. Just enter your email address and it creates an image for your email ID. Just upload the image to your server and protect your email.

Or if you prefer more customization, you can try the Mask Email Image Generator which will create a JPG image of your email address.

D - Twist the text - Instead of putting down your email address as a whole list it down as ‘yourname at yahoo dot com’. That will make a human user understand the email, but not the bot. It will get tracked by the bot in future as bots get smarter than this trick.

3. Use an alternate email address. If you still feel you cant live without users seeing you email id with @ and all / or without images or ‘mailto:’ links

Why not try a free email service like Yahoo mail, hotmail or gmail. Just dump these accounts and create a new one if you believe it is spammed beyond your control. These emails have very effective spam protection filters to send you junk mail to Bulk / spam folders and keep it separate from your inbox.

If you really do not wish to use a regular email service, disposable email services are also available to quickly create any unusual email address, recieve emails and dump later. More.

Maybe you don’t like free stuff. Some registrars like GoDaddy.com give you free 100 email forwards with a domain you buy from them. Which means you get to create 100 email address like admin@yourname.com or contact@yourname.com or harry@yourname.com. These emails just forward to your prescribed email address. The sender does not know your actual email address and it reaches your correct favorite email id anyway. If it is getting spammed, just delete the forward, change to another email, or create a new forward.

Protect your email today!