Making email addresses safe from bots on a webpage? [closed]

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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:

joe.somebody@company.com

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?

51 Answers
51

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="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/483212/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

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