Contactify - Hide Your Email Address (sounds a lot like SpamFreeze...)

Contactify is a newly released system that enables webmasters, bloggers or anyone else who publishes information online to share their email address in the form of an encoded link. Would-be email senders must pass a simple test to prove they're human before they can send you email.

The idea is to protect your email account from "robots" crawling the web looking for email addresses to spam. The best way to stop junk email is to avoid having it sent to you in the first place.

Does this sound familiar?

About 18 months ago SpamButcher launched the SpamFreeze service which does almost exactly the same thing.

Are we upset?

Of course not!

Let's be clear - SpamFreeze and Contactify are only moderately novel ideas. It's entirely plausible they came up with the idea independently. For that matter - SpamFreeze was inspired by some similar efforts.

We've even toyed around with releasing the source code to SpamFreeze -but have decided against it for a handful of reasons.

The important thing is that webmasters and bloggers have good options to keep their email addresses safe from spambots. If you stay off the spam lists, you might not even need to run spam blocking software.

So webmasters - use SpamFreeze, use Contactify, make a picture of your email address, or encode your email in javascript.

Just whatever you do, don't publish your email address online in plain-HTML.

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