ReCAPTCHA Mailhide

ReCAPTHA has become such a huge pain to solve. Personally I wouldn't even bother solving their horrible captcha to get your email unless I REALLY REALLY need it.

Is the benefit worth the inconvenience? I've had my email in plain text on my personal site for the last 2 years and haven't noticed an increase in spam (thanks to gmail, I suspect).

Far more user-friendly is Dan Benjamin's Enkoder. <a href="http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/" rel="nofollow">http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/</a><p>It requires that JavaScript be enabled for users, but blocks a large number of spam bots.

There's an older trick that still works for me: a passphrase in the subject line.<p>You can even include the passphrase in the mailto: uri. E-mail harvesters usually discard it, but a user who clicks the link (e.g. to compose a message in Thunderbird) will have their subject field populated.<p>Now set up procmail to redirect messages to /dev/null if the passphrase is not present. Now you can freely post the uri all over the web.<p>Real example:<p>mailto:aoxomoxoa@finnw.me.uk?subject=Don%22t+buy+this<p>(I'm confident that no spammer will send bulk messages with "Don't buy this" in the subject line, so that makes a good default passphrase.)

This is just another stupid hurdle that people are required to jump over if they want to use the internet.<p>If you offer products or services over the internet, stay clear of captcha. Unless, of course, you give a dam about your conversion rate.<p>Spam filters are effective enough to keep your inbox clean. There is no need to play hide and seek with email harvester bots.

Example: show hello@yourdomain.com in plain text on your site and let it pass Gmail's spam filter but send the reply from yourname@yourdomain.com if you get a non-spam message. Use Enkoder ( <a href="http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/" rel="nofollow">http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/</a> ) if you're really spam sensitive.

Although, if you are hosting your email with Google already, it seems kind of irrelevant. I happily post my email in `mailto:` form, and I get spam infrequently enough to happily read through it and laugh at the contents when I do (it's always the funny ones that make it through).

It seems the site's encoding is broken somehow. I see only question marks, instead of the å's, ä's and ö's it should display. (Trying to view the Swedish version)

A horrible idea -- those who really want your email will just get it when there is a leak at some big site (ala slicehost forum) and the people you most want to get news from won't take the time to get your email (except if you are very famous).<p>If you are that concerned about spam, let Google handle it -- get your own domain if you want -- and you don't have to worry too much about it.<p>justtoproveapoint-neverusedthisbefore@tomjen.net.

this has been around for years no? Also, in recent months I've started to move away from using reCaptcha everywhere on webform deployments because of increased difficulty from, shall we say, the less patient and computer literate, visitors of my sites.