I am very intrigued by the “Hide your email address from spammers” post yesterday by Gina Hughes: The Techie Diva on Yahoo!Tech. She’s talking about how spammers use automated tools to search websites and harvest posted email addresses.

“You’re probably familiar with CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) since most websites with logins and forms use them, but until now I haven’t seen one for individual email addresses,” writes Hughes.

The folks at Carnegie Mellon University have created an application called Mailhide to help you hide your email address. Your address is displayed with the … ellipsis, and if someone wants to view it, they must solve a test to prove they are a human and not an automated address gleaner.

This looks pretty interesting, and I’m going to give it a try.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software