Check if a website is revealing email addresses

You need to use the tools of the trade to check if your website is revealing emails from visitors or yourself. Most webmasters have a contact form somewhere on the page which is sometimes revealing the real email address of the webmaster. But even tricks like adding spaces to the email address, a REMOVEME part, writing (at) instead of @ and other means are recognizable by some email harvesters that do nothing else but to harvest websites and the websites that they link to for new email addresses.

One software that is able to crawl a single page, a website and even linked sites is 1st Email Address Spider. It costs $130 but everyone may freely test the software which has some restrictions in place. It is nevertheless sufficient for our cause. Once installed you simply enter the url of the website or page that you want to check, select if outgoing links should be checked as well and enter login information if needed.

The tool then connects to all webpages and links it can find and collects emails from those pages. It’s really interesting to see that websites advocating that you should conceal your email addresses are actually revealing lots of emails on theirs.

The best way to not give away your email address would be to not include it on any of your websites. Add a contact form instead that visitors can use to get in contact with you. If you have to publish an email address you should consider using an image, or more than one, to display it.

Some bots however are good enough to be able to process images as well.

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