I just received an automated email from a web service that was warning me about just tweeting my email address in a recent tweet to a friend. I knew it was something I didn’t really want to do, but I wasn’t sure of a way to really share my email address via twitter without opening it up to be harvested by potential spammers.
The Emails @ Risk website provides an option to save your email address as an image that you can share with other people on websites. That in and of itself is easy enough to do, but you can really share images via twitter without forcing the person to click on a link and then view the image on another website.
The other solution provided by Emails @ Risk is to allow you to put in your email address on a form, then they create an image of your email address and display it on a website that you can then share with others when you want to give them your email address.
Both of these are great options to keep you from putting your email address online in a format that spammer bots can harvest the address very easily. Nothing is foolproof, but this helps.
I’m thinking I may put my email address in an image on my own website and then just link to that image file whenever I want. I also just tried adding a bit.ly URL to a mailto: link of my email address wondering if that would work too. It links and tries to open in Gmail, but doesn’t pre-populate a message. I’ll bet it would work if I had Outlook serve as the default email program to use when clicking on a mailto: link.