scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10
Cool: [Wayback/Archive] scr.im « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.
Bumped into this via [Wayback/Archive] Mary Branscombe (@marypcbuk) / Twitter.
At the time of writing, it had an invalid TLS certificate, so you would get red warnings when accessing it over HTTPS.
Hopefully that has been fixed by now.
It’s not exactly security through obscurity, but it allows people to access your email after solving a captcha so it is not 100% secure but a lot more secure than otherwise.
I found it 5 years after mailhide got discontinued by Google. I used it on my [Wayback/Archive] Contact form through mailhide.recaptcha.net which Google slowly killed without me noticing likely because Google didn’t want to upgrade it from using reCAPTCHA v1 into v2 or v3.:
- 2007-05: [Wayback/Archive] reCAPTCHA Mailhide started
- 2010-06: [Wayback/Archive] reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Free Spam Protection redirected to
www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide - 2011-05: [Wayback/Archive] Not Found
www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide on the other hand started out as a 404-page:
- 2010-04: [Wayback/Archive] Not Found
- 2010-05: [Wayback/Archive] reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Free Spam Protection first time it functioned on this URL
- 2014-04: [Wayback/Archive] reCAPTCHA Mailhide: Free Spam Protection last time it functioned on this URL
I think this means that after 2014-04 you could not generated new mailhide URLs for an email address from the mail URL, but existing ones still kept functioning. Until 20180331 that is.
Only until somewhere in 2022 I found out it stopped working, so I made a mental note as other things in life were more pressing (like: staying alive).
> Reminder to self: finally get a smart 404-checker or broken-link checker to regularly crawl all my blog posts and pages (which is harder than you’d think as most links are intentionally accompanied by Wayback Machine/Archive.is links)
Fingers crossed that the scr.im link on the contacts page will keep functioning for a while.
Related
scr.im
- [Wayback/Archive] scr.im » why « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.
- [Wayback/Archive] scr.im » about « Share your email in a safe way. Get less spam.
- Written by [Wayback/Archive] Ozh Richard (@ozh) / Twitter
- [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “Hi @ozh, I just bumped into
scr.imvia @marypcbuk and found out it has an invalid TLS certificate which means you get big red warnings when accessing it over HTTPS.” - [Wayback/Archive] Mary Branscombe (@marypcbuk) / Twitter
- [Wayback/Archive] bleeding edge of technology
- [Wayback/Archive] bleeding edge of technology • Simon and Mary Technology journalists,….
mailhide
- [Wayback/Archive] “mailhide.recaptcha.net” – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] “mailhide” discontinued – Google Search
- [Wayback/Archive] Is Mailhide no longer supported? · Issue #221 · google/recaptcha
I noticed today that the v1 API for recpatcha had been turned off as of March 31 2018.
Now my mailhide links show a warning:
But there’s no clear way to upgrade to the v2 API. The mailhide home page still generates links that appear to use the old API.
Has mailhide been abandoned?
- [Wayback/Archive] reCAPTCHA Mailhide – Killed by Apple, Google and Microsoft
reCAPTCHA Mailhide
Description
reCAPTCHA Mailhide allowed users to mask their email address behind a captcha to prevent robots from scraping the email and sending spam.
Information
Developer Google Released 1 April, 2010 Discontinued 31 March, 2018 Lifespan 8 Years Type Service Source github.com - [Wayback/Archive] Google Graveyard – Killed by Google
–Service
reCAPTCHA Mailhide
Killed almost 5 years ago, reCAPTCHA Mailhide allowed users to mask their email address behind a captcha to prevent robots from scraping the email and sending spam. It was almost 8 years old.
- [Wayback/Archive] Google dismiss recaptcha v1 (which killed mailhide 20180331)
- [Wayback/Archive] Frequently asked questions | reCAPTCHA | Google Developers 2018-10 was the last month mentioning reCAPTCHA v1 here and also this:
I’d like to run automated tests with reCAPTCHA v2. What should I do?
With the following test keys, you will always get No CAPTCHA and all verification requests will pass.
- Site key:
6LeIxAcTAAAAAJcZVRqyHh71UMIEGNQ_MXjiZKhI - Secret key:
6LeIxAcTAAAAAGG-vFI1TnRWxMZNFuojJ4WifJWe
The reCAPTCHA widget will show a warning message to ensure it’s not used for production traffic.
- Site key:
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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