Safely Share Email Address Online Yes You Can!

I’ve been around the Internet for a while. Not as long as some people but long enough, around 13 years - golly, that sounds terribly long doesn’t it? Back to the topic. In those days, when you wanted to contact people, you just click on a link and voila! Your email client (Outlook Express) would popup and you type away. I used to think that was so cool.

Then, like everything else spammers had to come in and spoil it for everyone. So now, even the most newest of newbies are taught never to put their email address or link to it online. Instead, use forms. But you know, creating forms is such a pain.

It’s one of my top 10 most dreaded things to do on a website. Not that it’s difficult it’s just tedious. Don’t you just wish you could go back to the old days and toss out that email address so people can contact you without using those forms?

Good news. You can with reCaptcha’s Mailhide. What it does is make people complete a captcha or solve two words presented in an image. If completed successfully, your email address will be revealed and people can click on it to send you an email just like the old times.

How cool is that? The best thing about it is, by using reCaptcha, you also help digitize books. To preserve our books and information, many organizations are digitizing them by scanning and using OCR (optical character recognization) to help convert the scanned text. But OCR is not perfect. In fact it can make a ton of mistakes especially if a scan is not of good quality.

This is where we humans come in. To enter the correct words. But goodness, do you know just how many books there are out there? So the guys at Carnegie Mellon University decided, why not spread the work load and make it useful? That’s when reCaptcha was born.

Each time someone solves the word puzzle on your site to get your email address, they are helping to digitize books and hey, you’re contributing too because you’re using it on your site. Pretty neat huh? I think so and I love books.

If you’re interested to use reCaptcha, I’ve created a video to help you with that. Press play to watch.

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