The two primary methods used to combat this issue are contact forms, which have their own issues with spam, and obfuscation. There are plenty of pre-made contact form scripts, the better of which have some anti-spam measures in place (cforms and Contact Form 7 are popular options for WordPress). But what about obfuscation, for those times where it’s better to simply list the address rather than installing a whole form?

I’ve found a couple of good articles on the subject, for those of you who want something a little more complex than simply writing like “my email AT example DOT com.”

A List Apart’s Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation is an interesting read, though their solution is a bit involved and requires a bit of server-side scripting for it to work.

Perishable Press’s Best Method for Email Obfuscation? is a reasonable comprehensive guide, with plenty of clever methods to choose from, and pros and cons for each. I liked the techniques that involved writing the email backwards, or inserting null text in an HTML span, and using CSS to flip the text or remove the span of null text. Those two options don’t play nicely with copy/paste, though.

It’s a GMail-specific mail client for OS X that captures the spirit of GMail pretty well, and keeps everything perfectly in sync. You can archive or delete messages, tag them, even manage multiple accounts from a Tweetie-style sidebar. (The application actually takes a lot of design cues from Tweetie/Twitter.)

It also works with Google Apps accounts, so you can use it for your domain email.

Sparrow is a very nice email client, and is available in the Mac App Store for a reasonable price. I’ve been using it out since the last week of the beta, and it has convinced me to stop using the GMail website for my day-to-day email reading in favor of Sparrow. It complements the iPhone email client nicely in my daily workflow.

The authentication protocol’s biggest shortcoming is not the lack of websites support it, since more sites would implement OpenID logins if there were enough user demand; it’s not a shortage of OpenID providers either, since many large sites offer OpenID URLS. No, the problem is the users. The average web user just can’t seem to wrap their head around the concept.

I was recently struck by an idea that might simplify the experience for non-techies. What if OpenIDs could be in the form of an email address? Everyone is familiar with email addresses, and many sites have already accustomed their users to having their email address as a login name. If you really think about it, email addresses are already what OpenID has set out to be: a persona that you connect various websites to.

Imagine if GMail as your OpenID provider. To log in to an OpenId relying website you would input your email address, be sent over to GMail to verify, and then redirected back. I think it would be a little more user-friendly, providing that OpenID-providing email services made it clear that they offered the service.

Notify sits in your menu bar, up by the clock, and monitors multiple email accounts. It will check GMail, Google Apps, MobileMe, Rackspace, and generic IMAP boxes. When new messages come in, the number on the badge updates, and it can optionally make sounds or show Growl notifications.

If the ability to monitor multiple accounts isn’t enough for you, this feature will win you over: You can do basic email tasks right from Notify. You can press the spacebar to open a full preview of an email.  You can delete messages, mark them as read, or even send quick messages. It’s cut down on the number of times I’ve had to actually visit my inbox, as I can trash and quick-view messages without loading up the web interface.

It’s $10 for the full version, with a trial, but the basic inbox monitoring features are still available after the trial period is over.

The post covers the early days of the (ye olde) Hotmail service, well before Microsoft acquired the startup company, back when it was spelled “HoTMaiL.”

Smith wrote it down. He wasn’t sure about the “hot” part, but given everything else this seemed the best candidate. Then he noticed it contained the letters “HTML,” the acronym for “HyperText Markup Language,” the lingua franca of web pages.

The article largely focuses on the early attempt at virally marketing a website, which you’ve probably seen at one time or another. Back in 1996, and for years later, emails sent through Hotmail would have a little advertisement appended to the end, a single line reading “PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail.” This was back when email was fairly new to the general public, and it helped make HoTMaiL one of the leading webmail providers.

“Wait a second guys, don’t you get it?” Draper asked. A tag line at the bottom of each message would act as free advertising. “I can send you an e-mail and you can send it to all your friends and they get it and they can sign up and send it to their friends and pretty soon it takes off.”

It’s definitely worth a read, especially if you’re into the arcane lore and histories of the internet.

I didn’t know this until WordPress Garage pointed it out, but it seems that WordPress has a built-in obfuscation function. It’s called antispambot().

The function antispambot() above parses the e-mail address passed by get_the_author_email() (this is the same as the_author_email(), except it returns rather than displays the author’s e-mail address). Use of the echo command displays the output of antispambot(). An interesting feature is it encodes only portions of an address, and does so randomly so the letters encoded are different each time the page loads, adding a little more firepower to the spam protection arsenal.

The wiki page on WordPress.org has an example on how to use the function.

I just got a new Apple MacBook, as I’ve Twittered about, told everyone I know on Facebook, and all but made a T-Shirt that says “I have a MacBook.” I’ve been trying to adjust to the new (to me) platform, and adapt my daily patterns.

Surprisingly, I haven’t had many problems with old Windows habits (e.g. reaching to the top-right corner to close a window). My biggest issues have been with software. Some familiar applications have Mac versions thankfully. (If there wasn’t a Mac version of Firefox, I wouldn’t have been so quick to want to get a Mac.)

I had to find some Mac equivalents of some programs, like NeoOffice to replace Microsoft Works, and CyberDuck to replace FileZilla. (FileZilla is great, and there is a Mac version, but it behaves oddly, lacking a normal window, and extending down from the menu bar.)

Luckily, my transition (so far) has been easier than it could have been, thanks to web apps. I use Google Apps for my email, so I didn’t have to migrate my email to Apple’s Mail App. I use my own MyNT RSS reader for my feed reading needs, so, again, I was okay there. (On a related note, MyNT 2.0 is in the works, and it will be a couple lightyears ahead of the current iteration.) If not for MyNT, I’d have had to find a good feed aggregator for Mac OS X, and then muck around with CSV or OPML export/import to move my feeds over.

Storing data online definitely has its advantages. While you don’t want to store everything online (I’d hesitate to trust all of my documents—especially documents with private information—to Google Docs), some things definitely do work well as web apps. If you’ve ever used GMail or Bloglines between several computers before, you definitely appreciate the power of keeping some things online.

How does this apply to you? If you use web apps for some of your key applications, like email, RSS, calendar, you can work from anywhere. Most blogging software is generally web-based, so you’re all set there. Here’s an example:

• I use GMail (Google Apps if you want to be technical) for my email, so I can check my messages at any computer that has a reasonably modern browser.
• I use MyNT for reading my feeds, so I can keep up on news from anywhere.
• I blog with WordPress’s built-in editor, so I don’t have to worry about anything there.
• I use Google Calendar to store events important to my blog, such as the dates ads need to be taken down, and when I need to do some sort of maintenance.

So I can theoretically run my website with any computer that has a web browser, and preferably an FTP client, though that’s not necessarily something I need every single day (unless I’m doing some design or coding work on a site).

Web apps make sure you’re prepared if you need to work from another computer for a day, and they will make things easier the next time you move to a new computer.

My tip for today is too merge all of your email down into one account. GMail, and Google Apps, make this fairly easy. If you have a domain, I recommend using Google Apps. It’s much cooler to have you@yourdomain.com instead of domainlessguy73@gmail.com.

Once your new GMail-based email account is set-up, head over to the “Accounts” tab on the settings screen. Here you will configure your account to be the one place you go to check your email.

There are two ways to get messages from your other email inboxes into the new one. You have POP/IMAP and you have forwards. Here’s what I did:

• I picked my NTugo.com email address (powered by Google Apps) to be my new main account.
• I used POP to pull all of the messages from my old GMail account to my new inbox. After all of the emails were transferred, I set them all to “read,” and set the GMail account to delete the messages from it’s inbox after NTugo Mail grabs them via POP. So now any message sent to my GMail account go to the NTugo inbox.
• I went to my web host’s control panel and changed my Webmaster-Source.com email account from a normal inbox to a forward. Now any emails that go to matt at webmaster source dot com go to my main email inbox.
• I repeated the previous two steps for my other email accounts.
• Now all my email goes to one place.

I recommend setting-up some filters to label incoming messages with a tag corresponding to the address the message was sent to.

People have been doing this for as long as Google has provided this service, so this is nothing new. I’m just passing on the advice.