emailsensei.com
let sensei teach you how to fight spam with email images and temporary email addresses
== currently a beta sensei ==
System Administrator for Hire
Over 10 years of experience

Email to Image Frequently Asked Questions

General Questions

What is this all about?

Why would I need such a thing?

How do I use this service?

Why should I use your service and not some other service/site/program/mambojumbo?

If I use your service I won't get any more spam?

Is this service really secure?

What are the limitations of this service?

I have a suggestion/problem/feature-request/etc

How can I contact you?

How can I help/support you or your service?

Troubleshooting

I forgot my code/link/hash/whatever to my email image. How can I get it back?

My image is not displayed anymore although the link is correct


General Answers

What is this all about?

This service offers you a quick way to get an image (jpeg, png, gif) with your email address or any other text. You enter your email address (or any other text), customize its' look (color, font, size etc.) and get an image. You can easily download this image but we also host this image for you so that you can include a direct link to it in your home-page, your blog, some forum that you post messages into or any other page on the web. We provide you the necessary links so it's really a copy-paste process. It really sounds much more complicated than it really is - just give it a try - it's really free.

Why would I need such a thing?

To prevent spammers from getting your email address. There are many programs right now that crawl every page on the web to retrieve email addresses to be used for spam. This is a very efficient way for spammers to retrieve email addressed and then clutter your inbox. It is very easy for those programs to recognize an email address. This is why some people (and companies) stopped putting their email address on their web pages and many others tried other methods of making it more difficult for these programs to recognize their email address. A common way is to use the word 'at' (eg: myemail at somedomain.com) instead of the character '@' (eg: myemail@somedomain.com) - you've probably seen this one. You can also add more spaces, replace the '.' with 'dot', or write it backwords but in the end there's only a relatively small number of combinations that you can do and there are ways of circumventing these altogether with a pretty good success rate. There are probably some programs out there which are already updated to recognize 'at' and 'dot' as a part of a possible email address and their probably crawling right now tons of web pages. Some smart people then thought of a smarter way of making life hard for spam programmers: replace the email address written as text with an image that has the same text in it. Parsing images is totally different from parsing text so it's more difficult to update the spam programs. We took this idea to the next obvious level with our service and you can read more about this in our security section below. This is the main purpose of this service but you are free to use this service to get any text you want in an image format (jpeg, png, gif) - we provide the conversion, hosting and the necessary links that you can paste in any web page. We are also curious of what other people might find this service useful for anything other than an email address.

How do I use this service?

It's really easy. Just go to our home page enter your email address (or any text you would like to have as image), customize the looks (color, font, size etc.), press the button and you'll get to a page which provides your image and links to your image that you can include on any web page.

If you have the emailsensei Firefox extension installed you can insert the email ID in the emailsensei Firefox extension settings and from now on you can right click any text input field and in the emailsensei submenu you can choose to insert a link to your email image in that particular field. This way it's much more convenient to use the provided links wherever you need them.

Why should I use your service and not some other service/site/program/mambojumbo?

I'm glad you asked this question :) There are quite a few reasons for which you should use our service and not anything else with a similar concept:

  1. Trust We put it in bold because it's very important for us and it should be very important for you too. Why? Because you provide your email address to any site or program that provides this kind of service. Therefore that site or program could be itself designed by spammers and/or used by spammers to easily harvest email passwords or could sell the email addresses to spammers. We don't do that. We are really commited to fighting spam. You can trust us. Why? Because we are nice guys :) And to show you how nice guys we are we tried to make our terms of service really simple so you can actually read and understand the whole deal. So go ahead and read our terms of service - it won't hurt like it usually does :)
  2. Our service gets the idea of using images for email addresses to the next level by making those images harder to decode for non-humans (aka computer programs). Simple images are pretty easy to decode and it's probably only a matter of time and usage-scale until the spammers will add this capability in their programs. However, we offer this as an option so you can still have your image nice and good-looking if looks are more important for you than security. You should still read our security section to see more about how we're trying to make things more secure and why you should use these features.
  3. You can customize the result to look exactly as you want to (font, size, color)
  4. You can use a transparent background for png and gif images so that you can insert different the same image link in pages with different backgrounds and it will still look good
  5. It's really easy to use
  6. It's free

If I use your service I won't get any more spam?

Unfortunately you could still get more spam even if you use our service. We fight the spam battle but we cannot guarantee that we will actually win it. Even so it's very important that you too fight the spam by using this service.

Is this service really secure?

Security is relative so there is no short answer for this question. But security is and always will be a major concern for us. That's why we bring the simple idea of email address as image (instead of text) to the next obvious level by making it a complicated image that will be very difficult for the spam programs to interpret.

Right now the OCR technology is pretty mature and there are several different programs to provide this technology; some of them are even free and do a pretty good job. Therefore it will be fairly easy for programmers to integrate the OCR programs into their own software that crawls the internet and looks for email addresses (if they haven't already done so). It probably depends on how popular this technique (of using images with email addresses) becomes: if there will be many email images it will be worth spending some money on implementing OCR in spam programs; if the technique will not be very popular most of the spammers might not bother with adding such functionality to their programs. Using services like the one we provide unfortunately makes this technique more popular - so they might bother after all.

Fortunately OCR technology still has some limitations that are not trivial to overcome. So we thought of taking the idea to the next obvious level of making some more complicated images. It will be highly unlikely that computer programs will be able to efficiently decode such images in the near futures - so this way you will safe for quite some time. The downside to this aproach is that your email address will not look as pretty as it used to. It's still your choice to balance security with looks by customizing your image when you create it.

This is not the only thing we've done regarding security. Actually we are concerned with security in everything we do. However, there are never any guarantees.

What are the limitations of this service?

We reserve the right to delete images that haven't been accessed at all for some time (currently 180 days but this can change at any time without any notice). We do this in order to keep our servers from cluttering with old stale data that nobody needs anymore. You can (re)generate your image at any time. You can also prevent your image from being deleted by accessing it from time to time.

We also make impose some other limitations that are designed to prevent abuse of this service. We do not reveal these limitations in order to make them more efficient and also because they might change frequently. You must keep in mind that all these limitations are not made for regular users but to protect regular users from abuse. If your usage of our service is not abusive but you feel that you are limited in any way by our service please contact us and let us know about your problems. We'll surely work something out.

I have a suggestion/problem/feature-request/etc

Please write us an email to and let us know about it.

How can I contact you?

Just write us an email:

How can I help/support you or your service?

We're are surely glad you asked this question :) These services do come free but we worked to get it here for you. In order to be able to add new features, support our users or fix bugs we need your support. There are a number of ways in which you can help us very easily:

Troubleshooting

I forgot my code/link/hash/whatever to my email image. How can I get it back?

The bad news is that you can't get it back. The good news is that there is no need to get it back. Just go to our home page and generate the image again for that email address.

My image is not displayed anymore although the link is correct

Sometimes we delete images that haven't been used (accessed) at all for some time (currently 180 days but this can change at any time without any notice). We do this in order to keep our servers from cluttering with old stale data that nobody needs anymore. You can (re)generate your image at any time. You can also prevent your image from being deleted by accessing it from time to time.

Bitcoin donations: 192C8JCdvTPsLxT1hYxuMfbiuYH6Tqt6nW

Paypal and card donations:

Home  |   Frequently Asked Questions  |   Firefox Extension  |   Terms of Service  |   Blog

Powered by Tronkle.com