Go Ahead Put Your Email On Your Websites
For the longest time people have told you don’t put your email online and use forms instead. That is still good advise but the problem I have with forms is, it takes too darn long to set up. Sometimes all I want to do is set up a page quickly. It is so much simpler when you could drop your email address on the web page.
Enter reCAPTCHA. This is really a cool concept and it kills two birds with one stone. Almost everyone is looking for a captcha solution. If you haven’t come across the term before, a captcha is simply image verification. By using reCAPTCHA, you not only get a great solution for free, you help digitize ebooks. Here’s an excerpt from their website to explain this a little better.
Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.
Ok, you’re probably thinking isn’t that like really hard to do? Don’t I need a programmer or something to implement this on my web site? You could if you wanted to integrate it with say an existing content management system of yours or your existing membership sites. But if you just want a safe way to post your email address on a web site or even email, they’ve already done the work for you.
The following video shows you how to use reCAPTCHA MailHide.
Do You Want A Hands-Free Business?
Then get this guide to help you systemize your business so you'll have more time working on your business.
Hey! I want to make sure you know what you're getting here. In addition to the guide, you will also receive our memo that includes special offers, announcements and of course actionable information.
Cool app Lynette! Thanks for sharing this. And thanks for taking the time to put together the demo video. I for one find that video is very helpful in communicating concepts and ideas very effectively.
Another tool that accomplishes the same result but in a different way is a script from Will and Mari Bontrager (I think you already know about these folks). They call it “Harvest-Proof Email” [See: http://flow-to.com/ ]. It’s free too – currently in Beta though.
I tested this Bontrager script but there were a few bugs that caused me to abandon it. One advantage, however, of Flow-To over reCaptcha is that it keeps your actual email address completely hidden from everyone. Perhaps they have worked out the bugs by now.
Cheers,
Doug
Awesome resource – thanks Lynette for sharing – I will have to add this to my site.
Wow Lynette…Thats a good resource. Thank You
Hey everyone. Happy you found the tool useful. The only caveat using captchas is it’s difficult for those who are vision or hearing impaired or both. I really wish we could have a solution that would be friendly to everyone but guess I haven’t found it yet.
Doug – yes I remember flow-to. I’m sure once it’s out of beta those bugs will be squashed 🙂
Thanks for sharing Lynette, I found the video very helpfull too! I put my email on my sites and have a separate email set up for this just in case the spam gets too bad. I think it’s important to give people access to your email because many don’t want to fill out a form, this is a great way to do it while still keeping it safe. 🙂
Angela