![]() If you have the time, using a web-based email form is probably the best solution for contact pages, but if you just need a way to simply include an email address, one of those first three methods may be just the ticket for keeping your publicly displayed emails spam-free.įor more information on these (and more) anti-spam email techniques, check out the original article. Another challenging issue that I have experienced is getting contact forms to properly handle code characters ( HTML, PHP, et al). Most notably, it takes longer to set up and test an online form than it does to slap down a line or two of code (as in our previous examples). Of course, form email has its downsides as well. If you are using WordPress, there are many contact forms available, including my clean and simple Contact Form X, which is Ajax-powered for extra awesomeness. When it comes to providing an easy, spam-free way for people to contact you, nothing beats the convenience of a simple, web-based email form. Generally, these methods are useful for dropping the occasional email here and there, but perhaps the best method is to. So which one of these email-obfuscation methods is best? One of the first three, based on the test results. Definitely not recommended if you hate teh spam!Īnd, although it wasn’t included in the test, you could also use an image to display your email address, but the accessibility and usability is pretty poor, and there are bots that can interpret image-based text. And worst of all is just using plain-text to display your email address.Email-harvesting bots apparently have the whole “urlencode” game figured out. Encoding the email address with urlencode was less effective than any other method mentioned so far.Splitting the email address up with HTML comments was also ineffective at stopping spam. ![]() ” with character entities in plain-text addresses resulted in a significant volume of spam. Looks like harvesters are learning JavaScript. Building/inserting the email address entirely with JavaScript (404 link removed ) was the next-best method, but some spam still got through.” with “ DOT” in plain-text email addresses was also quite effective (but not 100%). The test also included a fistful of other methods that varied in their overall effectiveness. This is another 100% effective method according to the test, with the only downside being that JavaScript is required for it to work. which will create an email link on the page for your visitors: That snippet will then display the following markup: Let’s say we want to display and obfuscate the following email would include the email address by writing it backwards in our web page, and wrapping it in a tag with a nice class attribute: to display it properly for our visitors, we apply the following CSS. But which obfuscation method is the best one? I drove a test to find out.Īfter reading through the article and its many findings, here are what seem to be the best methods for obfuscating email addresses displayed publicly on web pages.Īccording to the article, one of the best methods for hiding your email address from spammers is to write it backwards and then reverse the text direction with a little CSS trickery. When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. Nine different methods were implemented, with each test account receiving anywhere from 1800 to zero spam emails. Awhile ago, Silvan Mühlemann conducted a 1.5 year experiment whereby different approaches to email obfuscation were tested for effectiveness.
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