Hi. On my home page I'm using next method to hide my email from spam bots:
<a href="admin [at] example.com"
rel="nofollow"
onclick="this.href='mailto:' + 'admin' + '@' + 'example.com'">Contact me</a>
What do you think about it? Is it effective? What other methods do you know or use?
See Making email addresses safe from bots on a webpage?
I like the way Facebook and others render an image of your email address.
I have also used The Enkoder in the past - thought it was very good to be honest!
The best method hiding email addresses is only good until bot programmer discover this "encoding" and implement a decryption algorithm.
The JavaScript option won't work long, because there are a lot of crawler interpreting JavaScript.
There's no answer, imho.
There are probably bots that recognize the [at] and other disguises as @ symbol. So this is not a really effective method.
Sure you could use some encodings like URL encode or HTML character references (or both):
// PHP example
// encodes every character using URL encoding (%hh)
function foo($str) {
$retVal = '';
$length = strlen($str);
for ($i=0; $i<$length; $i++) $retVal.=sprintf('%%%X', ord($str[$i]));
return $retVal;
}
// encodes every character into HTML character references (&#xhh;)
function bar($str) {
$retVal = '';
$length = strlen($str);
for ($i=0; $i<$length; $i++) $retVal.=sprintf('&#x%X;', ord($str[$i]));
return $retVal;
}
$email = '[email protected]';
echo '<a href="'.bar('mailto:?to=' . foo(','.$email.'')).'">mail me</a>';
// output
// <a href="mailto:?to=%2C%75%73%65%72%40%65%78%61%6D%70%6C%65%2E%63%6F%6D">mail me</a>
But as it is legal to use them, every browser/e-mail client should handle these encodings too.
One easy solution is to use HTML entities instead of actual characters. For example, the "[email protected]" will be converted into :
<A HREF="mailto:%6D%65%40%73%74%61%63%6B%6F%76%65%72%66%6C%6F%77%2E%63%6F%6D">email me</A>
Does it work if I right-click on the link and choose "copy URL"? If not, it's very much not an ideal situation (I very seldom click on a mailto link, preferring to copy the email address and paste it into my mail application or wherever else I need it at a specific point in time).
I used to be fairly paranoid protecting my mail address on-line (UseNet, web and the like), but these days I suspect more "possible targets for spam" are actually generated matching local-parts to domains programmatically. I base this on having, on occasion, gone through my mail server logs. There tends to be quite a few delivery attempts to non-existing addresses (including truncated versions of spam-bait I dangled on UseNet back in the late 90s, when address-scraping was very prevalent).
If you have php support, you can do something like this:
<img src="scriptname.php">
And the scriptname.php:
<?php
header("Content-type: image/png");
// Your email address which will be shown in the image
$email = "[email protected]";
$length = (strlen($email)*8);
$im = @ImageCreate ($length, 20)
or die ("Kann keinen neuen GD-Bild-Stream erzeugen");
$background_color = ImageColorAllocate ($im, 255, 255, 255); // White: 255,255,255
$text_color = ImageColorAllocate ($im, 55, 103, 122);
imagestring($im, 3,5,2,$email, $text_color);
imagepng ($im);
?>
I think the only foolproof method you can have is creating a Contact Me page that is a form that submits to a script that sends to your email address. That way, your address is never exposed to the public at all. This may be undesirable for some reason, but I think it's a pretty good solution. It often irks me when I'm forced to copy/paste someone's email address from their site to my mail client and send them a message; I'd rather do it right through a form on their site. Also, this approach allows you to have anonymous comments sent to you, etc. Just be sure to protect your form using some kind of anti-bot scheme, such as a captcha. There are plenty of them discussed here on SO.
You can try to hide characters using html entities in hexa (ex: @ for @). This is convenient solution, as a correct browser will translate it, and you can have a normal link. The drawback is that a bot can translate it theorically, but it's a bit unusual. I use this to protect my e-mail on my blog.
Another solution is to use javascript to assemble part of the address and to decode on-the-fly the address. The drawback is that a javascript-disabled browser won't show your adress.
The most effective solution is to use an image, but it's a pain for the user to have to copy the address by hand.
Your solution is pretty good, as you only add a drawback (writing manually the @) only for user that have javascript disabled. You can also be more secure with :
onclick="this.href='mailto:' + 'admin' + '@' + 'domain.com'"
First I would make sure the email address only shows when you have javascript enabled. This way, there is no plain text that can be read without javascript.
Secondly, A way of implementing a safe feature is by staying away from the <button> tag. This tag needs a text insert between the tags, which makes it computer-readable. Instead try the <input type="button"> with a javascript handler for an onClick.
Then use all of the techniques mentioned by otherse to implement a safe email notation.
One other option is to have a button with "Click to see emailaddress". Once clicked this changes into a coded email (the characters in HTML codes). On another click this redirects to the 'mailto:email' function
An uncoded version of the last idea, with selectable and non-selectable email addresses:
<html>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
email="[email protected]";
email_link="mailto:"+email;
</script>
<input type="text" onClick="this.onClick=window.open(email_link);" value="Click for mail"/>
<input type="text" onClick="this.value=email;" value="Click for mail-address"/>
<input type="button" onClick="this.onClick=window.open(email_link);" value="Click for mail"/>
<input type="button" onClick="this.value=email;" value="Click for mail-address"/>
</body></html>
See if this is something you would want and combine it with others' ideas. You can never be too sure.
Hello, there is a webpage, www.emailhide.org, that encrypts your email address in a secure manner. All you nedd to do is type in your email address and is returned html code with a link with your encrypted email. I've tried and now i use it everytime. There's also a automatic gen for webmasters. Check it out.
One of my favorite methods is to obfuscate the email address using php, a classic example is to convert the characters to HEX values like so:
function myobfiscate($emailaddress){
$email= $emailaddress;
$length = strlen($email);
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++){
$obfuscatedEmail .= "&#" . ord($email[$i]).";";
}
echo $obfuscatedEmail;
}
And then in my markup I'll simply call it as follows:
<a href="mailto:<?php echo myobfiscate('[email protected]')" title="Email me!"><?php echo myobfiscate('[email protected]');</a>
Then examine your source, you'll be pleasantly surprised!