How to hide your Website Email from Spammers
There are numerous means of adding contact details to a Website. In WordPress it’s incredibly simple to add a contact form with Plugins such as Contact Form 7 however having a postal address, email address and telephone number prominently displayed are all indicators of trust for consumers. Web surfers are more aware than ever that spam and not-to-be-trusted Websites don’t display contact details.
As many of us know there is a significant downside to displaying an email address on a Website; professional spammers have robots that scan Websites for email addresses and harvest (collect) these addresses. Once some of these spammers have your email address you can look forward to a mountain of unsolicited junk mail. Fortunately there is a very simple means of making an email address available to humans but extremely difficult for the robots to see.
Get Captcha for Email
Most Web surfers know how captcha works; a person has to enter into a field the characters shown. Robots find it difficult to accurately identify the shown characters therefore using a captcha on a form can eliminate ‘bots from filling forms.
reCAPTCHA Mailhide masks an email address by forcing the enquirer to enter a captcha before the email address is shown. All you need do to protect your email address on your Website is go to the reCAPTCHA Mailhide Site and add the code they give to you to your Site (wherever you want your email address to appear). When someone clicks on a part of the hidden email address, a captcha is show which, if entered in the available field correctly, shows your email address. Just like this:
gar…@eckstein.id.au
There is also the option to create your own link so you could place a hyperlinked piece of text like this: Click here to get my email address
There is no need to use a Plugin to use reCAPTCHA Mailhide on a WordPress website; just add the HTML into a widget or into the HTML section of the text editor in WordPress and it’ll work.
Help, my reCaptcha isn't in English! | Gary Eckstein
Oct 05, 2011 @ 18:58:40
[...] addthis_share = [];} Print PDF I greatly admire the reCaptcha project including the less popular reCaptcha Mailhide. reCaptcha is really clever as, whilst on the one hand providing verification for Website content, [...]