Graeme's Wiki

encode email address

If you need to send your email address in a public forum on newsgroup, it is normally not wise to send your email as is. Email harvesters will easily pick-up your email address and you will be spammed for life!

Here is an easy (and geekish way) of hiding your email address or any other text in a posted message:

First we need to encode the text or email address you want to publish:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("text I want to hide")'

This will result in the following output:

dGV4dCBJIHdhbnQgdG8gaGlkZQ==

Now reverse the command and used the encoded text, and post that in the public message:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print decode_base64("dGV4dCBJIHdhbnQgdG8gaGlkZQ==")'

Easy as that! If the receiving party doesn't have perl install on there system (linux always seems to include Perl), then they can Google for online base64 decoders - there are plenty. They simply need to paste in the encoded text and click decode.

So if you want to contact me, you can use my following email address:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print decode_base64("R3JhZW1lIEdlbGRlbmh1eXMgPGdyYWVtZWdAZ21haWwuY29tPg==")'