Safe Mail
Current version: 1.1.0.3
Status: Online
Project website: Safe Mail
About this project
Safe Mail is my piece of the puzzle that is the fight against spam. I had been working on a blog system and decided to safeguard the email addresses of the loggers and visitors with an email image. An image with a white background and the characters of the email address written inside of the image. The email address would be loaded from a person's profile and an image would be generated, which was displayed on the profile page. Quite a simple concept.
When I got my Gmail address I decided to take a different approach in using it around the web. I created a quick, simple, but working, concept of an email image generator that I used to create email images for myself that I could use on forums and place on websites. It was pretty effective, I haven't gotten any spam for at least the first year of using my new email address.
I was very pleased with my email image generator that I decided to make it public. I quickly crafted a website for it and called it Safe Mail. It went pretty good. Quite a few people used it to make an email image and I was pleased that I could help people fight spam with this simple service. However, the first Safe Mail website was rather "overwhelming" for most people. Lot's of text explaining what it did and little actual directions. That's why I relaunched the service on March 20 2006 with a completely new design. I gave the link to some of my friends with the advice to spread the word and so they did. The number of Safe Mail users went up. The new version of Safe Mail was a success.
Safe Mail lets you customize the look of the email image. You can select your own font, text- and background color. The background color is specified to match the anti-alias text to the background. Otherwise you would be left with a nasty white pixel border around the text. The color doesn't have to be exact, the email image is a transparent PNG set to the background color of the image. If you're off a little, or even if you have a background texture, it's no big deal to use a background color that looks somewhat similar. People won't notice a thing.
You may notice that the Safe Mail has a couple of advertisements on it. This is not so that I can make a profit, this is because my hosting bill is quite expensive. I use it to keep my hosting bills payed and Safe Mail a free service.
Photos, videos and other media
Credits
Safe Mail is one of my personal projects. It was designed and developed entirely by me.
Technical information
Server-side scripting:
PHP
Image manipulation software:
GD Graphics Library 2.0
Image format:
PNG with alpha transparency