Use an Image to Cut Down on Spam

In Use a Sneaky Signature to Reduce Spam, my Hassle-Free PC column, I talked about using an image of your e-mail address instead of a character-based e-mail address. The strategy is to convert the address into an e-mail icon for use on your Web site, in a newsgroup, a blog, an online community, or message forum, so spam farmers can't scoop it up.

You can even use an e-mail icon as a signature in your actual e-mails, though anyone reading your e-mail would also be able to get your address from the "From:" line. The however is that if your e-mail is posted in, say, a Yahoogroup message board, the signature image will do what it's supposed to do -- obfuscate your address.

The easiest way to create an image is by using an e-mail icon generator service. I like the one at nexodyne.com, but there are plenty of others for you to play around with.

For instance, another trick is to convert each character into hexadecimal code — essentially a long string of numbers. For instance, sb@pcworld.com will look like this:
=”mailto:s.

I use the free hex encoder from Tim Williams’s site — it’s free and a no-brainer to use. There’s another good one at K'nechtology.

Want more? Can do: Digital Colony lets you create an e-mail icon or an ASCII representation, and SignGenerator gives you colorful options for converting text into an image.

By the way, if you want a fancy, encrypted JavaScriped code to do the same thing with an e-mail address on your Web site, use the Encoder Form.

Comments

Post a comment Post a comment

0 / 1000 max characters