MailMung

If you place a link on your web page allowing readers to send you e-mail, you are opening yourself up to spamming. Spammers' robots crawl the web, harvesting email addresses. However, they only scan the plain text version of the page. This program will encode your e-mail address in such a way that a browser will display it correctly, but a robot will retireve junk which can not be used to address mail. For instance, in your browser, choose menu item View/Source and see how my email address would appear to spammers: graham@keellings.com

A very interesting study (performed after I wrote the program) has recently shown this method to be completely effective in preventing spammers from harvesting your e-mail address.

The program is very simple to use, with only a few options, as the following screenshot shows.

Enter your e-mail address and watch it be mysteriously transformed before your eyes. If you choose to "prefix mailto:" then the program will create a fully formed HTML tag with munged e-mail address, otherwise it will only mung the text which you give it. This will allow you to mung any text which you want to but generally you will be wanting to mung an e-mail address.

When you mung an e-mail address and create an HTML tag, you can also specify the text which should be shown on your web page. You can choose from a list of texts, or specify your own. You can also choose to mung this text, which might be useful if you want your e-mail address to appear on your page.

If any of this is unclear, choose menu item View/Source and examine the examples below

click here to mail me

mail

some munged text

If you are pleased with the program, why not place a link on your page, so that others can use MailMung?

The following code

<img src="http://www.keellings.com/software/images/mailbox_small.gif" width="37" height="37"> E-mail address
hidden from spammers by <a href="http://www.keellings.com/software/mailmung.html">MailMung</a>:

Will look like this on the page

E-mail address hidden from spammers by MailMung.

Download Windows executable here (69kB)