A New Image for Your Email Address

John Graham-Cumming, author of Bayesian spam filter POPFile, points me to a neat tool he’s created which will turn an email address into an image that may spare you some spam from bots scouring web pages for email addresses:

This site converts a text-based email address (such as me@example.com) and creates an image that can be inserted on a web site. The image contains the email address and is easily read by a human, but is intended to fool web crawlers that search for email addresses.

I can’t guarantee that this is foolproof, but Project Honeypot reports that image obfuscation of an email address is very effective (they say 100%) against web crawlers.

Enter your email address in the box and the server returns a string of gobbledygook which contains the email address (padded with a large amount of random data to avoid a dictionary attack) encrypted using a key known only to the server. When the image is loaded into the web page the server decrypts the email address and creates the image. (The email address is not stored by the server; it resides only in the HTML on your website.)

 Here’s what mine looks like:

Made using jeaig

If you need to put a contact address on your webpage or blog, but hate the amount of spam you’re getting, it’s worth a try.