Secure Email Address Search

Check for unsecure email addresses

Secure Email Address Search is an advanced tool to check the privacy for an email on the web page and protects site owners from email privacy issues. This Email Privacy tool also provides a complete email security, check all the incoming and outgoing emails on your site and also checks for any bug in your mail address.

What is email address harvesting?

Email harvesting is the practice of collecting lists of email addresses using a wide variety of methods for use in bulk emails or other practice commonly classified as spam purposes.

Spammers have programs that traverse web pages searching for email addresses.  The harvesting of email addresses is achieved using special tools known as "harvesting bots," "harvesting robots" or "harvesters" that crawl webpages and extracts every email address they find.

Email address mining is bad because your mailbox get overloaded with spam once your or your client's email address gets into the spammers' lists. Anyone who manage, design, or create web page, need to take proactive measures to avoid harvesting of email addresses.  

Protect your web pages from email address harvesting

You can protect web pages from email harvesting by enclosing individual email address parts with HTML comments.

foo<!-- >@. -->@<!-- >@. -->example<!-- >@. -->.<!-- >@. -->com

This would be displayed as [email protected]. Placing the @, ., and > symbols inside the comment makes it a little more difficult for the email harvesting software to harvest emails from your web page. Unfortunately, the drawback is that a user initiated mail client cannot be launched with this method.

It is common knowledge that to avoid email scraping, you write your email in a way that can be easily interpreted by humans but is difficult for bots to pick up on. The conventional advice is to write your email as "user at the dot com example;" since, it would not match the design for the harvester bot and would be skipped over. But scammers these days know about these tricks and have sophisticated algorithm to convert these tactics. 

Another method is using an Email Address Encoder which protects emails from the robots that collect emails and "text" links. This trick codes the email addresses in decimal or hexadecimal numbers. It simply uses JavaScript to secure your emails and "mailto" links from spam.