MailVeil - Email Address Encoding Tool

MailVeil uses Flash movies to make your email address look and behave normal for normal users while it is concealed from the spammers' email harvesting robots.
Unfortunately, MailVeil is no longer available.

Pros

Cons

Where do spammers get the email addresses from? Some of them are made up, but the majority is collected from the web. Spammers employ special robotic programs that scan web sites for strings that look like email addresses.

So posting your email address anywhere on the web (be it on your site or a forum, for example) is dangerous, but it also very useful and often necessary. How to make visitors see your email address (and let a click on it create an email addressed to you) while all the harvesting robots see is code?

MailVeil has a clever answer: Flash. Instead of your email address you use a small Flash animation that looks and acts like your email address but really is just code, at least to spammers. It's easy to encode a single address this way, but you can even have MailVeil replace all addresses on your site with such Flash movies automatically.

The only major downside to MailVeil that email addresses encoded with MailVeil really don't work for people using text browsers or devices that don't support Flash. Fortunately, there aren't many. Of course, spammers may one day and against the odds adapt and learn to read swf files with their robots.