reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Make spammers work hard for your email address

Filed under: Internet, Security, Blogging, E-mail

reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Make spammers work hard for your email address

by Brad Linder Apr 7th 2008

Looking for a way to post your email address online, but don't relish the idea of spambots picking up your address and sending you email ads for Viagra and anatomical enhancement pills? ReCAPTCHA Mailhide provides a simple tool for obscuring your email address.

All you have to do is enter your email address (and hope that the folks behind Mailhide aren't doing anything nefarious with it), and reCAPTCHA Mailhide will spit out a URL and some HTML code. Both take you to a page where you have to solve a CAPTCHA test like the one shown above to reveal an email address.

You can either provide a hyperlink to the URL, or embed the HTML code in your page. If you go the HTML route, visitors to your website will see a partial email address that looks something like b...@downloadsquad.com. When they click on the "..." a window will pop up asking them to solve the CAPTCHA. In other words, people don't have to leave your web site to get your email address. They just have to be able to decipher hard-to-read text.

[Thanks rossruns!]

Tags: captcha, email, junk-mail, mailhide, recaptcha, spam

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

nospammore said 11:37AM on 4-08-2008

Thanks!
It works without JavaScript too.

vince said 1:53PM on 4-08-2008

Hmmm OK but CAPTCHA style security is difficult for people with visual impairments. I see no mention of providing an audio alternative on the Mailhide site.

angelique said 5:07PM on 4-08-2008

@ vince: there is a little audio tab that when clicked, will speak a series of numbers for you to type in.

Rickard said 7:56AM on 4-10-2008

Why not just display the email address itself as a captcha with the option to get it read to you by clicking it?

Wilford Thoreau said 7:54AM on 4-15-2008

who cares really?

all it takes is $600 to hire 4-5 Paki or Indians to create you X amt of accts...

captchas dont really solve anything.

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