AKA Email2Image
The Solution. OK, for now only a temporary solution since robots are becoming more able to read images, but, for now email collecting spambots are simple scripts running collecting emails of webpages and therefore cannot read a GD2 Image.
New in November 2009 you can now save the picture output generated by this script on RPM-Production's ImgDep. From there you can link to it in Blogs, forums, emails etc.
Your email is read by spambots on a webpage. Text like email@google.com can be highlighted out of a page of HTML and then copied to a list which will then be sent endless amounds of spam, eg. CHEAP VIAGrA. I assume most of my readers are either sick of finding these emails or are perfectly able to get an erection so here I provide what I see as a temporary solution for most users.
At this moment in time very few spambots are able to read images, some script kiddies have decided to make what is known as CAPTCHA reading bots which have the function of faking logins to applications like forums. These CAPTCHA reading Spambots do not yet go for email addresses as such, especially since they would need to create a huge database of fonts and glyphs, so for now creating an image of your email address to stick into a HTML Page is a good idea.
You may say, "Hang on! Why not put email(NOSPAM)@google.com?". Let me tell you why, all it takes is some jiggery pokery (called REGEX), most of which can easily be done in seconds in languages like Python and PHP to remove or replace terms like "(NOSPAM)", ".at.", ".at.don'tspamme" to a correct, working email address. What good is that? You are more likely to get an email correcting bot attacking you than a CAPTCHA reading bot.
Enjoy...
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JSColor picker used in this page, See here: http://jscolor.com
