Secure Your Email Address Online

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If you have a blog, you would probably want to give out your email address so that your readers can contact you. But how do you prevent scamsters trawling through webpages from harvesting your address and sending you lots of unsolicited email? More importantly, your email address might even appear in a Google search for your name! One way is to include your email like Fictitious_John [at] gmail [dot] com but this does not look very professional.

Here's an alternative that Fictitious John might be able to use: . Notice that the email address comes as an image and cannot be harvested by a crawler (Google included).

Hidetext lets you convert your text to images that can be embedded in webpages without any fear of them being harvested. What's more, you can download the image so that even Hidetext does not need to keep a copy on their servers. The current text limit is at a generous 100,000 characters - enough to convert all of your private information (up to and including entire blog posts, if you so desire). You can even choose the color, size and font of your text in the image. Here's Fictitious John's email address with a little more jazz:

This method of protecting personal information is as good as Captcha graphics you usually see on websites. Hopefully we'll see more users for Hidetext in the future.