Effective method to hide email from spam bots [duplicate]

When placing email addresses on a webpage do you place them as text like this:

[email protected]

or use a clever trick to try and fool the email address harvester bots? For example:

HTML Escape Characters:

&#106;&#111;&#101;&#46;&#115;&#111;&#109;&#101;&#98;&#111;&#100;&#121;&#64;&#99;&#111;&#109;&#112;&#97;&#110;&#121;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;

Javascript Decrypter:

function XOR_Crypt(EmailAddress)
{
    Result = new String();
    for (var i = 0; i < EmailAddress.length; i++)
    {
        Result += String.fromCharCode(EmailAddress.charCodeAt(i) ^ 128);
    }
    document.write(Result);
}

XOR_Crypt("êïå®óïíåâïäùÀãïíðáîù®ãïí");

Human Decode:

[email protected]

joe.somebody AT company.com

What do you use or do you even bother?

Solution 1:

Working with content and attr in CSS:

.cryptedmail:after {
  content: attr(data-name) "@" attr(data-domain) "." attr(data-tld); 
}

<a href="#" class="cryptedmail"
   data-name="info"
   data-domain="example"
   data-tld="org"
   onclick="window.location.href = 'mailto:' + this.dataset.name + '@' + this.dataset.domain + '.' + this.dataset.tld; return false;"></a>

When javascript is disabled, just the click event will not work, email is still displayed.

Another interesting approach (at least without a click event) would be to make use of the right-to-left mark to override the writing direction. more about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark

Solution 2:

This is the method I used, with a server-side include, e.g.  where emailObfuscator.include contains the following:

<!-- // http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20040202/154813.html -->
<script type="text/javascript">
    function gen_mail_to_link(lhs,rhs,subject) {
        document.write("<a href=\"mailto");
        document.write(":" + lhs + "@");
        document.write(rhs + "?subject=" + subject + "\">" + lhs + "@" + rhs + "<\/a>");
    }
</script>

To include an address, I use JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript"> 
    gen_mail_to_link('john.doe','example.com','Feedback about your site...');
</script>
<noscript>
  <em>Email address protected by JavaScript. Activate JavaScript to see the email.</em>
</noscript>

Because I have been getting email via Gmail since 2005, spam is pretty much a non-issue. So, I can't speak of how effective this method is. You might want to read this study (although it's old) that produced this graph:

enter image description here

Solution 3:

Have a look at this way, pretty clever and using css.

CSS

span.reverse {
  unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
  direction: rtl;
}

HTML

<span class="reverse">moc.rehtrebttam@retsambew</span>

The CSS above will then override the reading direction and present the text to the user in the correct order.

Hope it helps

Cheers

Solution 4:

Not my idea originally but I can't find the author:

<a href="mailto:[email protected]"
    onmouseover="this.href=this.href.replace(/x/g,'');">link</a>

Add as many x's as you like. It works perfectly to read, copy and paste, and can't be read by a bot.

Solution 5:

I generally don't bother. I used to be on a mailing list that got several thousand spams every day. Our spam filter (spamassassin) let maybe 1 or 2 a day through. With filters this good, why make it difficult for legitimate people to contact you?