Encrypting Email Links

I never advertise my email address. It’s just a policy of mine. I get enough junk email without telling spammers exactly where to send it. You won’t find it anywhere on Project Paradox, my MySpace profile, my comments on other blogs, my posts on forums, or anyplace else for that matter. Why be so secretive about it? Let’s just say that I’ve had to abandon one too many email addresses because of spam.

As it turns out, though, there is a way to put your email address out there for the world to see without risking lots of spam. Just plug it into this nifty Mailto Encoder, copy the code it generates, and paste it into your website, your forum sig, or wherever else you want your email address to appear.

It works like this. Most spammers rely on automated spider programs to search the internet and gather email addresses for them. This is the only feasible way to do their jobs, really, since a successful spammer needs more email addresses than any human being could ever gather manually. Thankfully, spiders aren’t as smart as humans; they can grab ordinary email links easily, but they have a much harder time recognizing complicated code.

The real beauty, of course, is that your human readers won’t be able to tell the difference; you confuse the spiders without sacrificing usability or convenience. Of course, it’s not foolproof. Hate them as we might, spammers are notoriously clever people. It’s only a matter of time before they make the spiders smart enough to see through the trick.

Still, it never hurts to make their jobs more difficult. And besides, encrypting your email links is the only way to broadcast your email address with any degree of safety, short of never broadcasting it to begin with.