It’s Boop vs. the bots

It used to be when you wanted to send an email to Newsonaut, you’d go through gmail.com. I recently switched to a newsonaut.com address, but it didn't take long for bots to scrape it and start spamming me. My solution was to convert all the characters in the address to HTML entities. These are bits of code that are meant to help browsers decipher special characters such as a copyright symbol, but are available for every letter in the alphabet. The idea is that bots won't bother with deciphering them and will move on to greener pastures. There are plenty of online services that do conversions for free, but you have to wonder what they’re getting out of it. Maybe it’s ad revenue or maybe they’re hoping someone will be foolish enough to input their email address. The solution is a free app called Boop. Download it to your Mac, and you have the ability to do a plethora of text conversions. Plus, with JavaScript, you can create your own. In this case, I chose “HTML encode all characters”.…