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How can we minimize getting spam email, or at least getting our email addresses harvested by spammers?

1. Email addresses posted on Websites (message boards, USENET groups and blogs) are at much greater risk of being "harvested" by spammers (automated collection of email addresses)

2. The “masking” of an email address was very effective in thwarting harvesting.
 
"...The “masking” of an email address involves altering the appearance of an email address so that it is understandable by a person who sees the address, but less likely to be discernable by automated harvesting software. For example, to mask an unmasked email address such as “johndoe@ftc.gov,” the words “at” and “dot” can be written out, and segments of the email address can be separated by spaces. The masked version of the address would appear as “johndoe at ftc dot gov.”..."

3. Nevertheless, I suspect it wouldn't take much for spammers to get their harvesters to automatically change "at" to "@" and "dot" to "." and pick up common domains like "gov", "com", "org" etc, that's why I created www.ComicStripGenerator.com where you can have your text embedded into a JPEG image (without having to buy photoshop or install any software) so that the text is only human readable!

sample 2

Here some tricks to avoid email spam:

  1. Do not list your, or your favorite email address on web pages as you usually do.
  2. Use forms for feedback which submit via cgi scripts.
    These forms are better for receiving feedback and convenient enough for surfers. Also they protect your email by not revealing it in the page source code.
  3. Use an image to display the email address (do not make a mailto: HREF tag to you image). But remember two above rules. Make this image fast with Email Image Generator or with a few more steps you can create funny cartoon images with extra word space on Comic Strip Generator. We also made the Logo Generator where you can turn your email address into a protected image, but there are a few font choices that do not have an at (@) sign. Download these images to upload to your own web space or use free image hosting services for storing your email image signatures (custom "mail sig").
  4. Use an alternate email address. If you feel you cant live without users seeing your email id with @ and all / or without images or ‘mailto:’ links.
    Try gmail, as they have cool anti-spam and virus filtering feature.

Some people believe that a plain background image can be read by a specialized OCR (optical character recognition) web crawler (but this would be a lot of work and would require customization for every image type and style, not worth it with the wealth of unprotected data on the net). If you are a believer of this theory, then maybe you would rather try www.BannerGenerator.org where you can embed your text (FREE service too) into web banners with over 750 image backings to choose from (or select from over 25,000 gradient variations).

Downloadable image making (txt2jpg/txt2img) tools we made:

  1. Comic Strip Maker/Creator (over 750 cartoon character choices already, send as FREE ecard)

  2. Famous People's Quotes image generator (500+ faces, Arnold, Jesus, Oprah, Trump, send ecards)

  3. I LOVE generators (create banners, buttons and titlebars with this "IYGENERATOR", non e-card)

  4. Online Banner Creator V2.0 (ultimate banner creator, 25,000+ banners to edit, txt2jpeg)

    5.

  5. Simple Email Signature Maker (Txt2Png, create image of your email address, hide from spam robots)

  6. Web award generator (make instant web/blog awards, ready for download instantly)

  7. Warning label Generator (make simple danger type signs, 100+ designs, text2jpg)

  8. Danger sign generator (50 styles, dangerous sayings & safety labels for home/office)

  9. Watermark generator (put custom captions on any JPEG or GIF to protect web image, txt2gif or txt2jpg)

    10.