Hack 39 Hide Your Email Address from Spammers 
Use your PayPal referral ID to prevent your
email address from being harvested by spammers.
Spam (unsolicited bulk email) is a growing problem for Internet
users, especially for those who have web sites that can be spidered
by spambots looking for
email addresses. The HTML
generated by the PayPal Button Factory contains the email address
listed in your PayPal account, making it available to address
harvesters. Prevent this potential misuse by replacing your email
address with your referral ID (also
known as the affiliate ID).
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This hack does not work with the HTML code generated for the PayPal
Shopping Cart [Hack #45] .
It also doesn't support encrypted buttons [Hack #37],
although buttons protected by encryption are already well-protected
from spammers.
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To implement this fix, you need to obtain your referral ID from the
PayPal web site and then edit your HTML button code, substituting the
referral ID for your email address.
To obtain your referral ID from PayPal, click the Referrals link at
the bottom of any PayPal page. You will see a text box with a
URL in it, which will look
something like
https://www.paypal.com/mrb/pal=ABC1DEF2GHIJK.
Your referral ID is the part of the URL after
pal=; in this case, the referral ID is
ABC1DEF2GHIJK.
To put the referral ID in place of your email address, open the web
page that contains the button in a text or HTML editor and find the
all sections of code that look like this:
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="youremail@yourisp.com">
Replace your email address with your referral ID, like this:
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="ABC1DEF2GHIJK">
You will need to do this for each button on your site. Your buttons
will operate normally, and your customers won't know
the difference.
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Keep in mind that this hack does not provide anonymity. Buyers will
still see your email address in the process of making a payment.
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