Frequently Asked Question
E-mail addresses in your Webpage are indeed prone or is primary target for spam robots.
Email harvesters and crawlers are the most unwanted visitors on any website. These email spambots crawl the web via search engines in a very precise procedure to find and parse email addresses from pages and is done recursively.
Email harvesters or parser lingers mostly on Chat rooms. Email harvesters also scan published areas of the website like internet newsgroups and commentaries including Forum Sites., "Contact Us" webpages, mailing list archives and guest books.
How email spammers operates?
These harvesters focus more on any wordings which contains @ symbol. Most spambots do a pattern-search for likely combinations of letters in the HTML source of webpages. SIt is so simple that they just search for the @ character and grab all the letters on each side on the assumption that it's a valid email address. Some even are very clever that they market Browser plugins to read through the websites to which visitors logs into.
How to keep your email address available to humans but invisible to email Harvesters?
By now, you might have employed or has installed a plugin on your back-end just to protect and obfuscate your company or 'Contact us' Email Address. These plugin claims to protect your email address in web pages and get rid of junk mail - Don't waste your money, they only encode your email or generate a javascript snippet.
If so, then it is rather more cost-effective and practical to do the same manually. If a visitor clicks an encrypted or obfuscated email link on your website, it will work as normal, but spam robots will not be able to extract or parse the address from the link.
Replace the AT (@) and DOT (.) symbols:
The most common approach to block email harvesting is to remove the @ symbol. If you obfuscate the @ symbol(char) from email addresses then most bots won't be able to parse that the text is actually an email addresses: Here are some examples:
support AT mycompany DOT com
support (at) mycompany.com
support_AT_mycompany_DOT_com
Mask your email with tags, append meaningful words:
Consider "masking" your email address. Masking involves putting a word or phrase in your email address so that it will trick the Bots or it's algorithm, but not a person. Some email masking examples commonly employed by newsgroups and mailing list subscribers:
support AT mycompany DOT com notspam
support (at) mycompany.nospam
support_AT_mycompany_DOT_com_removeme
Also known as email address munging - changing your real e-mail address in a way that will make it unavailable for harvesting.
Replace text with an image:
This technique involves creating a graphic or screen capture of your email address text in jpg, png or gif formats and display that picture instead of the actual address string. Robots and spiders can't read the text that is embedded in the image. Anyone who wants to email you will have to manually type in your address though.
Email Obfuscators
E-mail Obfuscator make you email less vulnerable to spammers. Using an online email Obfuscator, convert (or disguise) individual characters of your email address into corresponding ASCII code (a a hex coding) For example, the email address [email protected] is represented in ASCII as:
[email protected]
The above ASCII string can be used as argument for mailto: protocol as shown here. Email addresses will appear perfectly normal, and will even be clickable, to human visitors to your website.
e-mail to confuse sniffer ASCII_STRING
Encode the mailto: and @ symbols with special HTML characters Encode the mailto: and @ characters with this code:
mailto: changes to mailto
@ changes to "@"
The email link HTML code to hide your email address will look like:
hidden email
Use Macromedia Flash
You can easily create a tiny.swf file in Flash with embedded mailto: behaviour. The button action used to pick up the text held in the variables is:
on (release){ getURL ("mailto:" +recipient+ "?cc=" + cc + "&subject=" + subject + "&body=" +body) }
Requires Macromedia Flash player on client's machine.
Hide email using CSS trick (direction property)
Scramble the email - While coding HTML, jumble and write the email address in reverse direction. ([email protected] should be written as moc.b@a).
We can then use CSS stylesheet to reverse the email address again when rendering. Here's the sample HTML code with CSS.
.backwards {unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;}
moc.ynapmoc@troppus
If someone copies your email address, it will available in the reverse direction. Would not work on older browsers. Clever, isn't it?
By far, the best method to obfuscate Email Address
Encoding email addresses on your web site reduces the risk of spam but they are not foolproof methods. The best option is to replace your entire contact mechanism with a contact form and using the POST method while submitting the form.