All kinds of protection have been created to prevent this from happening. Some suggest using images instead of text, many obscure their emails in the hope that the bots will not be able to identify the right one and others are not publishing their mail at all.

Tinymail steps in and tries to be a barrier between your email address and the Internet. It does that by linking your email address to a Tinymail webpage which becomes your profile page. Instead of publishing your email on the web you embed the Tinymail code that is created after linking the email to a Tinymail email address.

The Tinymail code is showing part of the real email address and a link to the profile page which is only accessible if the user enters a captcha. If he does that he can take a look at the real email.

The idea itself is nice but it has two flaws in my opinion.The first is that it adds another step to the contact process. That might not be a problem if you desperately are trying to contact one but it is definitely a problem for other forms like providing feedback on a product. Users might give up in frustration and prefer to spend their time elsewhere.

The second is the captcha protection. Captchas have been broken in the past and once it is broken it could become a haven for a email collector who stored all those Tinymail emails in a database waiting for the right moment to decipher them all.

It would be nice if the email link could be deleted again after usage for a certain time, maybe even let it run out automatically after x days where x is a figure that the user can define in the options.

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