Email Address Encryption. How to Protect Yourself from Spam

How many times a day you get those nasty emails that offer you “grow” something or buy something? As for me, I’m already tired of those letters, and you know what, there number gets worse and worse.

So how it happens that we get spam letters? That’s because somewhere on the web, at forums, blog comments or anywhere else, you’ve posted your email the way it looks [email protected], without spreading it with brackets like this youremail (at) gmail.com or just blanks.

People who send spam (does anyone know how they look like?) use email harvesters, scrapers or email hunters, these programs have different names. Using this software one needs to provide a starting web site or starting keywords, and just let email grabber do the rest. It will crawl web site and collect all email addresses it finds.

So how to insulate yourself from spammers? There is a number of ways: you can use brackets (that's pretty old school) or email encoders, these scripts encode your email address into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

This is how my email looks when encoded:

1

alex.bulat@templatemonster.com

To make it look like this alex.bulat@templatemonster.com just paste the hex values into the code of the page and not a single harvester will track your email.

Online Email Encoders

If you feel that it's time to protect your address from black hat techniques here are some online tools that will encode your address into hex:

Email Encoder

Just paste in your email address, and press ENCODE button.

HTML Encoder

It will format your email address so that it will not be readable by harvester or search engine. The Encoder is only provided as a way to prevent HTML E-mail harvesters from getting your address from your web pages.

WordPress Plugins - Email Encoders

If online encoders are not exactly what you need here are some WordPress email encoding plugins for your site.

Email Address Encoder

A lightweight plugin to protect email addresses from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

Email Encoder Bundle

Encode mailto links, email addresses or any text and hide them from spambots. Easy to use, plugin works directly when activated.

Simple Mail Address Encoder

Automatically encodes every e-mail address in a mailto tag on posts, pages, sidebar widgets and post/page meta values to prevent spam. Simply decodes any previously encoded e-mail address by just clicking the mail link.

Pixeline's Email Protector

Write email addresses without worrying about spambots and email harvesters.

WP Mailto Links

Protect email addresses and mailto links from spambots and being used for spamming. Easy to use without configuration.

These were most popular and trustworthy techniques of fooling email grabbers, I hope these tips will help you avoid spam mailing lists. Surf safe.