jeaig: jgc's email address image generator

What it does

This site converts a text-based email address (such as me@example.com) and creates an image that can be inserted on a web site. The image contains the email address and is easily read by a human, but is intended to fool web crawlers that search for email addresses.

I can't guarantee that this is foolproof, but Project Honeypot reports that image obfuscation of an email address is very effective (they say 100%) against web crawlers.

How it works

The user enters an email address here and will be returned a snippet of HTML that displays their email address as an image. The HTML is in the form:

<img src="http://jeaig.org/image/UmFuZG9tSVbAX97gmPVJ2SkKfTNcX1R211W-Jjyfw8YjakAMVGodLNV3ET9SUyCy2Zt1R4kFRWptkqxQ7kNEMA.png>

This looks like:

The long string is the email address (padded with a large amount of random data to avoid a dictionary attack) encrypted using a key known only to this server. When the image is loaded the server decrypts the email address and creates the image: the email address is never stored by this server.

Instead of giving the user a static image, this service uses a dynamic image so that it can be changed if web crawlers start to perform OCR on the email addresses.

Obscure my address

This service is free and it does not store your email address. It was created by John Graham-Cumming. If you like it, I'll be happy to receive a tip to help pay my hosting bills.