Hide Your Email Tool

Protect Your Email from Bots

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Unwanted, unsolicited emails, commonly sent in bulk (also known as email spam), are a serious problem for Internet email users. Spammers use bots to search the Internet for email addresses and sell their collected lists to other spammers, who then use them to send out junk emails to unsuspecting users, often infected with malware or containing links to corrupted webpages. Most spam messages contain messages for dubious products or services, including illegal/phony pharmaceuticals, casinos/gambling, and loan/financial scams. A recent study estimated that in 2012, up to 94% of all email sent across the Internet is spam – as many as 94 billion messages each day.

Spam traffic is expensive to businesses. Spam recipients are exposed not only to scams, but to phishing hazards and malware of all types, including viruses, Trojan horses, and web browser exploits. Internet service providers and companies operating their own email services bear the costs of scanning and filtering out all of this junk mail. Then there are the staggering costs suffered by unsuspecting customers ripped off by scammers or by IT departments in cleaning up spam-borne malware infections. Estimates put the annual figure for the costs of spam as high as $255 million in 2012, and that figure does not include the cost of lost productivity.

Spammers collect email addresses from a variety of sources. Even when some people take measures to hide email address details, spammers search websites for links containing the href attribute prefix mailto: (used to start the default email client) and for strings of text adjoining the @ symbol (as used within an email address). In addition, they search blog comments, online user account profiles, Usenet and web forum posts, and more to find email addresses. Some common email domains, such as Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com, and Aol.com, are subject to dictionary attacks, where spammers create all possible forms of letter and number combinations as guesses for likely email addresses. Many people carry out a basic search for information such as “how to protect email address on website” but then make the mistake of linking their obfuscated email address.

To minimize your exposure to junk email and hide your email address or prevent your private email address from being picked up by email harvester spam bots follow these recommendations:

Unfortunately, hiding your email address can frustrate business contacts who appreciate the ease of use of clicking a simple MAILTO link to send a message.


Cool Hide Your Email Tool

To effectively hide your email address from spam email harvesters but still present an email address on a webpage, use the Cool Hide Your Email Tool. The email obfuscation tool offers two methods for hiding an email address:

  1. Create an image containing the email address text customized with font formatting options. Use this method when you only want to show an email address without making it clickable so that it will still hide your email address from spammers. Do not enclose the image in an anchor tag. Doing so puts the actual email address in the source code, making it vulnerable to capture by harvester bots.
  2. Use the <script type="text/javascript"> </script> tag to insert JavaScript inline in place of an anchor tag. Using the provided sample script, simply update the two variable values with the email addressee user name and the domain name of the correct network address. The result of the script will be an inline link that appears in the browser window as a normal anchor tag using the mailto: href attribute. However, in the source code of the page, any spam email harvester will be unlikely to parse the code script and harvest an email address.
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