Best way to obfuscate an e-mail address on a websi

Question

I've spent the past few days working on updating my personal website. The URL of my personal website is (my first name).(my last name).com, as my last name is rather unusual, and I was lucky enough to pick up the domain name. My e-mail address is (my first name)@(my last name).com. So really, when it comes down to guessing it, it's not very hard.

Anyways, I want to integrate a mailto: link into my website, so people can contact me. And, despite my e-mail address not being very hard to guess, I'd rather not have it harvested by spam bots that just crawl websites for e-mail address patterns and add them to their database.

What is the best way for me to obfuscate my e-mail address, preferably in link form? The methods I know of are:

<a href="mailto:[e-mail]">e-mail me</a>

It works, but it also means that as soon as my website hits Google, I'll be wading through spam as spam bots easily pick out my e-mail address.

<img src="images/e-mail.png" />

This is less desirable, because not only will visitors be unable to click on it to send me an e-mail, but smarter spam bots will probably be able to detect the characters that the image contains.

I know that there is probably no perfect solution, but I was just wondering what everyone thought was best. I'm definitely willing to use JavaScript if necessary, as my website already makes use of tons of it.

Answer 1

Check this out.

The 'Enkoder Form' will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to Email harvesting robots.

Answer 2

The Ajax call solution

The best is to have a form on the website and not to show email address, because all robots are more intelligent day after day, but if you need to show email address on the website, so, you can make it with ajax call on your server, and show it on click.

HTML

<a class="obfmail" href="#" rel="info">click here to show email address</a>

or

<a class="obfmail" href="#" rel="info">
    <img src="img/click-to-show-email.jpg">
</a>

jQuery

$(document).one'click', '.obfmail', function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    a = $(this);
    addr = a.attr('rel');
    $.ajax({
        data: { 
            email: addr
        },
        url : "/a/getemail",
        type: "POST",
        dataType: 'json',
        success: function(data) {
            a.html(data.addr);
            a.attr('href', 'mailto:' + data.addr);
        }
    });
});

PHP

if($_POST['email']) {
    ...
    return json_encode(array(
        code     => '200',
        response => 'success',
        addr     => '[e-mail]'
    ));
}

For more security, you can change .on by .one like this $(document).one('click', '.obfmail', function(e) { or even work with a PHP generated token that you pass into data on ajax call, to accept only one call of the ajax function like this :

html: <a class="obfmail" href="#" rel="info" token="w3487ghdr6rc">

jquery:

...
addr = a.attr('rel');
tkn  = a.attr('token');
$.ajax({
    data: { 
        email: addr,
        token: tkn
    }, ...

.

It is possible to encode the returned email address too or invert it.

.

Working fine for phone numbers too !

Answer 3

If you work with PHP, you can grab a free script that does that automatically. It's called "Private Daddy" and we use it for our own online audio streaming service. Just one line of code and it works out of the box... you can grab it here

Answer 4

I use JavaScript obfuscation, take a look at this one for example:

http://www.jottings.com/obfuscator/

Answer 5

reCAPTCHA offers a simple email obfuscation service. You don't need to set up an account and can start using it immediately. You can use the service as a link or as a popup.

After the captcha is solved, your email address appears as an href/mailto, so that it can be clicked/followed by users who have configured their email clients to work with their browsers.

Answer 6

You could do as Google do on Google Code (and Groups). Display a par tof the email, and a clickable portion ("..."). Clicking that indicates you want to know the email, and you are asked to fill in a captcha. Afterwards the email (and others?) are visible to you.