Email Address Encrypter

One way to show your email to visitors of your site while hiding or obfuscating it from spammers, is scrambling or enciphering it. The encrypter on this page transforms your email in a code you can put on your site. Visitors of your site, with Java activated, can read the email and click on it to send you an email but it will be protected from most spambots or email harvesters. They will have difficulty to find and decipher the encoded email.

Placing emails on your site

For most site owners, placing an email on the site so visitors can get in contact, is very important. Preferably visitors only need to click on the email address, write a message and sent it.

Unfortunately, putting your email on your site or any other place on the Internet, has become a problem. With the growing use of the Internet and emails, the problem of spam is also getting bigger and bigger. One of the things spammers do is email harvesting. That is, scanning the Internet to find emails to which they can send their spam. For this reason, it is not a good idea to put an email on you site just like that, without encrypting it. If you do, it won't take long before you start receiving spam, and it won't take long before you receive so many spam mails, it becomes difficult to find emails that interest you between them. That is why you need to protect emails on your site by hiding them from spammers.

Four ways to hide emails

Basically there are four ways to hide emails from harvesting bots.

Placing the email as an image. This used to work very well but now there are bots using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract emails from images. I am pretty sure one of my emails became target of spammers like this. Because some people disable Java or don't have it on their system, possibly for safety reasons, I still use images for emails but I cut it up so reading one image will not reveal my email. Let's see for how long that works well enough.
Replacing key characters and introducing illogical characters, in a way that humans can still recognise the address but robots can not. This is often called to as obfuscating or munging. Most common is replacing [@] with [at] and [.] with [dot]. Example: "me@mysite.com" becomes "me [at] mysite [dot] com". Some other examples, where characters are introduced to fool spam bots, are: "m e [ a t ] m y s i t e [ d o t ] c o m", "m-e [at] m-y-s-i-t-e[dot]-c-o-m" or "me [at] mydelitethissite [dot] com". Simply replacing [@] and [.] with [at] and [dot], like in the first example, isn't effective anymore. Harvest bots already recognise this. Other varieties, I think, are either to complicated for site visitors to solve or it will only be a matter of time before the harvest bots can decipher it.
Placing HTML tags in the email address is also used. I don't think this can be very effective. HTML is a standard and standards are meant to make life easer. If you use the HTML or any other standard tags, to hide an email, you make life easy for the decipherer. A harvest bot writer only needs to build in a filter for HTML tags to detect and decipher emails hidden this way.
Changing letters in codes that are difficult to recognise. There are many sites claiming to provide obfuscators or encrypters. Most don't do much more than changing letters to their ASCII code or Unicode. That seems a bit to simple to fool people who can earn a lot of money with harvesting email addresses. Here too, encoding is based on a standard, making life easy for the decoder.

This email encrypter

The encrypter provided on this page should provide better protection because it uses different keys for standard elements and nonstandard elements of the email address. Moreover, it produces a Java script which needs to be run in the visitors browser to decode the email. It seems that, at least for the moment, spambots can not run Java scripts.

Using the same key for everything makes it too easy to find the email address. As said above, it is not very difficult to discover a key based on standard. Standard elements like [mailto:] or the domain name. Comparing the encoded email address with standard elements like this, makes it possible to derive the key and discover the enciphered email. Using a separate key for different parts of the email address makes it much more difficult to find the hidden email address. That is the principle behind the email encrypter on this page. Care was also taken that no part of the encoded email is recognisable anywhere in the produced Java script.

Privacy

As can be expected from this page, I don't like spamming nor other invasion of privacy. Therefore I will not collect, much less pass to others or sell the email, entered in the fields, to be encoded. The code is generated automatically and, as far as I can control it, non of the entered or generated information will be stored or provided to others.

Free

Some things still are for free. I use much of the free stuff available on the Internet, some of it is really good. That is one of the reasons I chose to place this email address encrypter on my site and allow visitors to use it for free, to contribute, to give something back.

Encrypt your email

To have your email enciphered or encrypted, type it in the given spaces, click [Generate] and the Java code will generated. Select all the Java code from the box. Copy and past it to the page where you want the email to appear, at the place where you want it to appear. For your visitors it will work as a normal [mailto] link. They can read it, click on it so their email program opens with the address in the right place, they can copy and past the email address. Email harvest bots will neither recognise it nor will they be able to decipher it. I don't suppose it will be bot-proof forever but I'm pretty convinced it is better than what I have seen and that it will work fine enough for quite a while.

Try it and if you like it, I would appreciate some feedback like a message on my message board, informing how well it worked. If you don't like it or found a problem, feedback will be greatly appreciated as well.

Please, leave intact, in the Java code, the note with author, link and copyright.

Sobrenome :		Last name :
Prenome ?		First name ?
Idade ?		Age ?
E-mail :		Email :
Telefone ?		Telephone ?
Site ?		Site ?
Assunto :		Subject :
Comentários : Somente texto simples, por favor.		Comment : Only plain text, please.

Ver Comentários		See Comments