Scramble email address

I have previously published a post Make a link for visitors to eMail you. As mentioned in that post, using the mailto: link can enable email address harvester to harvest your email address for sending spam. However, I created a special gmail address for this purpose, and had not been much troubled by spam as practically all of them end up in the spam folder.

However, I moderate comments via email notification using the same email address, and have been complaining to Blogger that not all comments get email notifications as described in Problem in moderating comments via email moderation still not solved. I have been requested to check the spam folder, and this means going through quite a lot of spam messages even though it is not that difficult because they are all in the same folder and are easy to recognise. However, it still takes time. Further, I have found that some genuine requests for help had ended up in the spam folder.

I now have changed to scrambling the email address in the hope that this will prevent most email harvestor in getting the email address. If you want to do that, surf over to
http://tools.blogflux.com/emailscramble/
Type in your email address and the message you want to display in the link (I used "Click here to contact me"), then click "Scramble email link >>". Copy the script, get into LAYOUT, click on Add A Page Element and select HTML/Javascript. Paste the script into the window and save. This will appear at the top of the section in the LAYOUT. Click and drag it to wherever you want, and then click "Save" at the top of the LAYOUT. You can see the link near the bottom of the left sidebar of this blog.

There are many other sites that offer encryptation and you can google for them by typing "encrypt email" or "scramble email" into the search box above, tick the WEB radio button and search.

This may not be 100% foolproof, but will still be better than using the mailto: link. If you want to be doubly sure, use graphic to display your email address instead. In this case, those who want to contact you cannot just click on a link. They will have to observe the email address in the graphic and type the email address into the To: field in the compose mail editor window of their mailbox. I believed I have written about it, but can't find it at the moment. If I find it, I will post the link here. Otherwise, I will do a new post and also post the link here.

Acknowledgement: Found out about this site from Amanda of Blogger Buster