3 Ways To Hide Email Address From Spam Bots

You’ve heard that you shouldn’t add your email address straight to your site. If you think you are “hiding” or masking your email address by using AT instead of @, you are sadly mistaken. AT isn’t cutting it. Many (spam)bots can read it and are harvesting your address. Here are 3 ways to hide your email address from bots and still make it accessible to the folks who need it.

Email Image Generator

These programs/scripts allow you to type in your email address and they create a graphic for you to save to your computer. You would then upload the graphic to your site and insert it in any place that allows graphics.

You can find many of these image generators online. Simply search for the phrase email badge, email image generator, or email obfuscator. Digital Colony has one that you may want to use. To use it, just fill in the information and save the graphic to your computer like in the picture here.

**Note: In order for this to work, you can not  link the graphic to your email address. Also note that when I saved one of these graphics to my computer it had a .jpg.png extension on the end. I renamed the graphic and removed the .jpg part.

Contact Forms

Another way to keep your address from being harvested is by using a contact form. There are loads of these out there. If you are using WordPress, and I hope you are, you may want to try out a plugin called Cforms2. You can find out more at the Cforms2 WordPress plugin page.

After trying many contact plugins, this is the one I settled on for my sites. One of the reasons that I chose this contact form is that it comes with pre-programmed forms, can be customized to match your site with the css, allows for a variety of uses including polls, and can be placed on multiple pages or in posts.

You can see a simple example in action on my contact page.

Captcha

Captcha is simply an image verification where you enter the letters, number, or phrase you see. I have one of these on the comment area. In my case, I have configured Cforms2 to add this. However, if you want something a little more simple, you can use reCAPTCHA.

This allows you to actually mask your address yet add a link at the same time. You would add a phrase like “contact me” on your site or in email and link the phrase (anchor text) to the code that reCAPTCHA provides. Just keep this link handy to use whenever you need it. Want more info? Check out this video to see exactly how it works.

So there you have it, three ways to hide your email address from bots. Now there is no reason to recklessly throw your email address up. Just use one of these suggestions to keep the harvesters at bay while your customers still have access to the contact info they need.

After you try out one or all of these, let me know what you think by leaving a comment.