How We Protect Your Email Address

An 'email harvester', also referred to as a 'harvester bot' or 'email spider', is a computer program that automatically visits web sites and compiles lists of email address it finds. The programs find sites by doing automated searches on search engines. An email harvester can also find sites by following links on a website it has already run into.

In the HTML of a website, a typical email link looks like this:

     <a href="mailto:you@domain.com">you@domain.com</a>

This code is really easy for email harvesters to recognize. If you're using an email link like this on your website, you've probably already been a victim of an email harvester.

Using our service, you will replace this outdated email link with code that we provide.

Once implemented, your new email link will open up a new window that connects to our servers. The visitor will then be asked to look at an image that contains some letters. They will be asked to type the letters they see into a box and click on a button. Visitors can also use our fully accessible text-only process.

You can see an example on this page to try it yourself.

Even though the process is quite simple for humans, it would be very complicated to make an email harvester that can get through the process.