The Bottom Line
Web-Email-Cloaker is a small download, and it quickly encodes your email address as used in mailto: links on web sites to prevent it from being collected by spammers. The address cloaking applied by Web-Email-Cloaker is not particularly advanced, and adding default subject and body values could be more comfortable.
Pros
- Web-Email-Cloaker hides your email address in mailto: links from spammers
- Using JavaScript and HTML character entities, Web-Email-Cloaker encodes addresses
- Easy to use, Web-Email-Cloaker requires no installation and works out of the box
Cons
- Web-Email-Cloaker does not make it easy to create default message subjects and bodies
- The JavaScript used by Web-Email-Cloaker could be more advanced
- Spammers may adapt to the tactic used by Web-Email-Cloaker
Description
- Web-Email-Cloaker encodes email addresses in mailto: links to hide them from spammers.
- Addresses are encoded using either simple HTML hex encoding or a bit more advanced JavaScript.
- Web-Email-Cloaker also encodes default subjects, cc and body values.
- Web-Email-Cloaker comes as a simple executable executable and requires no installation.
- Web-Email-Cloaker supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP.
Guide Review - Web-Email-Cloaker - Email Address Encoding Tool
Spammers are hungry for email addresses. They make them up (who knows), and they aggregate them. One great place to find working email addresses is the web, and (personal) web sites containing mailto: links that allow readers to contact the author in particular. If you want a mailto: link but also want to avoid handing your email address to spammers, you can encode the link a bit. Browsers and visitors will still show and see and be able to use your email link like before, but the harvesting tools of spammers may be tricked to avoid collecting your address.
Web-Email-Cloaker is a particularly simple and easy to use tool for doing just that. Type your email address, and Web-Email-Cloaker returns a more or less encoded version of a working mailto: link. Less encoded if you want your link to work with all browsers, a bit more encoded if you require JavaScript. Of course, there are tactics — unique keys and Flash, for example — to make an email address harder to decode, but typically what Web-Email-Cloaker does should suffice.
Since Web-Email-Cloaker dutifully encodes any string, you can add default subject and body values to your mailto: link, though Web-Email-Cloaker does not make it easy by providing extra fields.
