For those of us who develop, or develop just enough to dabble, in WordPress here is a great plugin I came across to solve a common annoyance. When you put an e-mail address out on your website, that is carte blanche to allow customers to contact you. The problem is that this also opens the door to suppliers and people who want to sell you products or services you may or may not need for your business or site. While many of us DO rely on e-mail to communicate more involved thoughts than a text message, we generally try to connect with you first. For other folks, “cold e-mail marketing” is a viable strategy for getting customers despite its traditionally low return.

While there are lists of addresses you can purchase, and tools such as Yext to harvest contact information, there are lots of software and practices which involve coming by a website and using tools such as Hunter to harvest e-mail addresses. This is all generally legal, but what if you don’t want your address harvested for marketing or sales purposes though it needs to be set out for customers? Here a WordPress plugin can help. This article from TechRepublic, a great resource for IT Pros, can help. This “Email Protection” plugin turns your e-mail address into an image which is hard to capture from your website. For those concerned about security, this is a simple fix to what could be a large problem.