Research has shown that by putting your e-mail address on a web page you could be receiving spam within a few days.

The Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington D.C. advocacy group, recently posted 250 new email addresses publicly. Within six months, it received more than 10,000 emails, mostly spam. Consumer Reports tried a smaller-scale test, putting four new addresses on public Web pages. One received its first spam within six days.
Source: NZ Consumer Magazine Online

Obscura puts an end to that. It allows you to put e-mail addresses on web pages, making them visible and functional to your web site visitor, while hiding them from software that can automatically "harvest" addresses. As of June 2004 I can verify that this technique works - I have had my e-mail address on my web site for over 6 months now and I am yet to receive a single spam message.

Obscura combines two techologies to keep your e-mail address visible to browsers (even those that are not using Javascript or displaying images), whilst defeating "harvesters" (even intelligent ones that interpret Javascript). This gives you confidence that your web site visitors can see your e-mail address and can contact you, plus peace of mind that spammers will not automatically "harvest" that address.

Obscura has the following advantages over other methods of obscuring email addresses: Your email address is viewable as plain text on the screen. This means that visitors to your site have access to your email address should they wish to record it for later reference. This applies even if they have Javascript and images turned off. (Technical point: Your viewable email address is concealed from automated address harvesters by a jumbled table.) The "send email" link behaves just like a "mailto" link. Mouse over it and it brings up a mailto: message in the status bar. Click on it and it starts a new e-mail in your default mail program. The fact that the e-mail address is obscured is not apparent to the user. (Technical point: Your clickable email link is secured using Javascript. It defeats harvesters looking for the symbol @ or the link mailto:, as well as defeating intelligent harvesters looking for href="javascript:...". Obscura's Javascript is not attached to the href part of the link, but to the onclick event.)

How to use Obscura

Simply enter your email address and click "Make obscured email." Obscura produces code for an HTML table. You can place that code anywhere in the body of your web page. You can set styles for the table in a style sheet with

table.obscura { }

and for table entries with

table.obscura td { }

Here is an example of the output from the program, using a fictional email address:

---

		@		.
Email:	someone		somewhere		com	send email

---

View the HTML code produced by Obscura for the above example.

Obscura is available from the author's homepage. Obscura is freeware and may be freely copied and distributed without restriction .

Free Download

Download and run version 1.2 for Windows installobscura12.exe 135KB (139,252 bytes)

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