Email Encryption For The Web

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May 13, 2006

At Pittsburgh’s Web Analytics Wednesday, I told the story of this post whereby I mistook someone’s email address for an alternative website address. Dan Halpern of Duquesne University said, “Why do people circumvent the bots with ‘myname at gmail.com’ text, when they can just encrypt their email address?” He then sent me a link to this email encoder site. (It looks like there are a lot of encoders out there, just type in spambot encoder.)

I tried it and it works (but I don’t know if bots caught onto this one long ago.) Here’s what this particular encoder says about themselves:

This form will allow you to encode your e-mail address through the use of Character Entities, transforming your ascii email address into its equivalent decimal entity. Simply enter your regular e-mail address in the first text box, click the encode button, and then highlight and copy the resulting code produced in the second text box. This encoded e-mail address can be read and translated back into its original ascii text by almost any web browser without any further action on your part. Just replace all instances of your e-mail address on your pages with the code, and you won’t have to worry about spam lists.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics