Hide Your Email Address Online with Google’s reCAPTCHA Tool

We’ve all been there where our inbox has crossed the limits of how many spam emails it can hold. It is because of one thing you’re doing wrong and that is, revealing your email directly on websites. You make it easy for spammers to discover your address and bombard you with unnecessary emails. Here is a way to hide email addresses online with Google’s reCAPTCHA tool.

Why Hiding Your Email Address Online is Important?

First of all, let’s understand why is this utterly necessary. Spambots are generally automated to crawl into webpates, fetch emails and send bulk messages to them. Therefore, the reason your inbox gets an endless number of spam messages is that somewhere you provided or posted your email without taking any additional safety measures.

Spambots are created to locate a particular pattern in a web page, for emails, they will locate something with ‘@’ and a domain. They also scan for [at] and [dot] so if you think that breaking down your email address will protect you then sorry. However, these are computerized algorithms and can be easily tricked with some neat filters or tools.

A report by US Federal Trade Commission concludes –

…consumers who must post their email addresses on websites can substantially reduce the risk of (spam) harvesting by masking their addresses.

Hide Email Address Using Google’s reCAPTCHA Tool

Google offers a fantastic little antispam tool that camouflages your address until the user resolves a reCAPTCHA which can’t be operated by robots. As a result, your inbox won’t be abused by spammers resulting in a much safer affair.

To get started, head over to the website and enter your email address in the textbox, and hit the “Protect it” button. You will be then provided a URL if you need it for direct purposes and an HTML code if you’re adding it to a website.

reCAPTCHA will hide the email ID partially with dots as a placeholder and as soon as the reader clicks them, a pop-up with a unique puzzle will appear. If someone enters the correct digits from the image, the email address will be revealed.

There are few other methods available where you can encrypt your email address so spambots recognize it as garbled text whereas end-user will see as a normal email address.

What is the difference between Hiding, Encrypting, and Obfuscating?

Hiding involves revealing only a part of an email address. Encrypting revolves around the concept of keys while obfuscating makes use of confusing expressions to protect some information. In the case of encryption, the user needs to have a key in order to unlock the data. On the other hand, obfuscated content can be broken down by reverse-engineering the logic implied.

Obfuscating Email Addresses Online

While reCAPTCHA gets the job done the most users have to go through the trouble to input the text to verify. Hence, there are a couple of neat less stressful alternatives that obfuscate and encrypt email addresses.

#. You can use the encoding technique where the characters are converted to HTML entities with this tool. However, this technique is most easy to break.

#. You can use javascript encryption with this tool.

#. If you have access to the server, use the PHP solution as described here which is the most secure way after reCAPTCHA.

That was all. We hope this article will reduce spam if you happen to post your email address online.