Protect Your Email Address with reCAPTCHA

Many of you may know that sharing your email address on your church website or blog is a surefire way to increase the amount of SPAM you get. Spambots are continually crawling the web and stealing email addresses whether they are visible on the page (e.g., john@church.com) or merely in the code (e.g., email me).

Yet many churches share the email addresses of their pastors and staff in such a way that they are prime targets for SPAM. Even a larger church like First Baptist of Taylors, SC does this (e.g., pastors and staff).

What can you do? There are several options. A popular one is to add characters that will cause the spambots to miss it, but allow the human reader to “decode” it. For example, you might see john AT church dot com or something similar or johnNOSPAM@NOSPAMchurch.com. Yet I’m guessing that the spambots are just as creative in ignoring characters like this as we are in coming up with them.

Another method that I just stumbled across involves the use of reCAPTCHA. You enter your email address, and it will generate some code for you to use on your site. It hides the address from spambots, but allows humans to get it by entering in the text from an image. So if we supply john@church.com, it will give us j…@church.com. Clicking on the … brings up an image like you see above. Entering the correct text results in a screen containing the email address.

If you’re having trouble with SPAM, reCAPTCHA’s Mailhide might be worth a try.

What do you do to fight off SPAM?

HT: ChurchCommunicationsPro

Like this post? Subscribe to our feed .