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How to cloak an email address?

Friday, May 11, 2007 | Permalink |

Someone (I’m not going to give their details) contacted me today via the link I showed you earlier for the email anonymizer, Contactify. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought I had clearly labelled the link “Here’s a working example you can use to contact me.” And, my assumption was that anyone reading that description and using the link would realize that their message goes through to a HUMAN BEING. Obviously, this was an erroneous assumption on my part.

Civility died online. This one line “demand” is what I received.

Want information on “cloaking” a email address

That was it. No Hello, no please and thank you. No signature. Well, go on wanting mate, because I am not your slave or search engine.

Look, whether you show me respect or not is not the issue here. (Though I would consider myself as worthy of some as anyone else is.) But, if you want to get on - online or offline - and especially in business, then this is going to involve dealing with other human beings; business partners, customers, prospective customers, etc., on civil terms.

If this is the way you think it is appropriate to communicate anywhere - call me old-fahioned if you want - but I think you will not get far.

Obviously, I’m making an example of this email, but at least 7 out of 10 emails I receive from “internet marketers” are pretty similar and often less polite. If, as I suspect is often the case, these mostly males think they can get away with it because I’m a woman, they’re very mistaken!

I’m glad to help anyone, but I do not respond to this kind of email, because they always seem to bring trouble of some sort; they don’t “like” it when you give them truthful answers, they argue, they only wanted your response so they could get your email address to spam, etc.

Don’t believe me? Remember, I’m speaking from a decade’s experience of how things work and how people behave online.

If people contact you in this manner, I suggest you ignore them too. Don’t encourage them. If they have to learn to be civil in order to get a response, well, they’ll have to do that then, won’t they?

/ Rant over.

For those nice civil folks who are reading this and would like to cloak an email address on your pages, here is a list of Freeware Email Address Cloakers. The only one I’ve used is the last item, E_Cloaker. But these methods are in no way foolproof and are possibly pointless today.

Even images are not spamproof.

As Will Bontrager points out “Email addresses transformed as HTML entities or obfuscated with other HTML encoding schemes are easily extracted by even relatively unsophisticated harvesting software.” He discusses ways email addresses are harvested, as well as providing more solutions in this article on Protecting Your Email Address.

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