You probably know that Facebook uses an image format to display email addresses on profile pages.
While most people use this technique to protect their email addresses from spam bots, Facebook converts addresses into images for a completely different reason. They want to prevent their own users from exporting email addresses of their own friends out of the Facebook wall (through scrapping).
Use Facebook-generated Email Images outside Facebook
If you right-click and copy the web address of any email image inside Facebook, the URL would be something like this:
http://facebook.com/string_image.php?ct=ABCD1234&fp=8.7
where ABCD1234 is a unique string that is different for every email address and 8.7 is the font size that is used while rendering the image.
What’s interesting here is Facebook doesn’t require authentication for these URLs.
That means you can directly mention these image addresses in your Twitter messages, in online forums or any other public web pages where you are worried about mentioning your email address in plain text as spam bots might harvest them for the purpose of spamming you.
So the next time someone wants my email address on Twitter, I can point him to this Facebook URL – http://bit.ly/my-email. If I want to embed this email address images on a web page, the code would be:
<img src="http://www.facebook.com/string_image.php?ct=ABCD&fp=20" />
You can vary the font sizes by changing the value of the fp parameter in the URL as I have done in the following examples – these are all dynamically generated images.
Related: Hide Your Email Address from Spam Bots
Find this article at: http://labnol.org/?p=11477
Reader Comments
wow..This is interesting… And it ll be cool too.. to give the mail address in big font..hehe
Written by Pranav on 12.04.09
You might want to consider using scr.im, which is better suited for this. You can refer to it at twitdom.com/scrim
Written by Anuj Seth on 12.04.09
Great tip, Thanks!
I’ll write about it on my blog tomorrow at 9 am (GMT +1)
Written by Fulvio Minichini on 12.04.09
It is pretty safe. However, I have reverse engineered this :) for one of our apps. Though we don’t make out code public, it is doable :). But it definitely takes a lot of work, so it is definitely safe to use this :)
Written by Keith Dsouza on 12.04.09
How interesting! I always wondered about this. Thanks.
Written by Jennifer on 12.04.09
Hi,
This is quite interesting one, thanks amit
-MUn
Written by Munawer on 12.04.09
Thanks Amith.
Informative and Interesting.
Best Wishes and Regards.
Written by Nelson DSouza on 12.04.09
Wow, it is really a good tip. Thanks for sharing Mr. Amit.
Written by a_usman on 12.05.09
@Amit
… or just linking the person to link ;)
Written by Marco on 12.05.09
Nice one…
Wonder if there was a way we could specify the email address also in the get url.
Is it the MD5 code for email address???
Written by Akshay on 12.05.09
Very nice idea, but who knows how long it takes until FB will close that “service” for the public?
Written by Alfred on 12.05.09
Wonderful article and the website as whole, great collection
Written by Aayush Blogger on 12.05.09
Don’t make your brain neurons to burst. Go easy. use txtninja.com/
Pss: Any opening for technical writer here? How’s the tip guys?
Written by Gaurav Paul on 12.05.09
It’s maybe useful too: services.nexodyne.com/email
Written by Aleksey on 12.06.09