How to hide your email address from spammers, and their automated
email harvesting robots.
Boy do I hate receiving unsolicited emails. That is
a exacerbated by Spammers, mass-mailers, etc. who employ these little
programs, called email harvesting robots or bots. Their only job is to
surf from page to page on the internet looking for email addresses to collect and
save. These email address's are everywhere on the internet and
especially on commercial websites, like this one, where the company wants to give
legitimate customers and/or prospects an avenue to contact them.
The bots look for the tell tale signs of an email address in the form of 'xxxxxx@yyyyyyy.zzz' (Let them find that
one!), where the xxxxxx is the user name, followed by the '@' symbol, then the
company name (yyyyyyy) and ending in a TLD (Top Level Domain) like '.com', '.net' or
'.org'. This format is can be found in the plain text that you can read
and/or in the HTML code that the bot can easily read.
One way to thwart these bots, is to change the format to effectively
hide the email from those bots by using JavaScript and/or other techniques.
How To Use the JavaScript Method
The following are examples of JavaScript that you can use to make your email
appear different in the code but still perform the same function as if it
regularly coded in HTML. To use these examples, just copy and paste the code into
your HTML document and then replace the field with your email address.
1. Basic Email using JavaScript
<script language=JavaScript>
<!--
document.write("emailhere" + "@" + "commercefriends.com");
//-->
</script>
Result:
2. Basic Mailto: Email using Java Script with Link Text
<script language=javascript>
<!--
var username = "emailhere";
var hostname = "commercefriends.com";
var linktext = username + "@" + hostname;
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" +
username +
"@" + hostname + ">" + linktext + "</a>");
//-->
</script>
Result:
3. Inline JavaScript
<a href="#" onclick="javascript:window.location='mailto:'+'emailhere'+'@'+'commercefriends'+'.com'">
Email Us
</a>
Result: Email
Us
With the above three javascripts options above, should give you some
flexibility in how you use these scripts on your website. Remember to insert your
own email address into the fields about where the regular emailhere@commercefriends.com
email address is located.
4. Encoding
For an extra measure of email security, you could change the code to
use an encoding method. This has been a very effective measure against
those email harvesting bots.
Code Before:
<a href="mailto:'xxxxxx@yyyyyyy.com">xxxxxx@yyyyyyy.zzz</a>
Code After:
<a href="mailto:%78%78%78%78%78%78%40%79%79%
79%79%79%79%79%2E%7A%7A%7A">
Email Me</a>
This involves changing, or encoding, each character. It will
still work like a normal mailto: link to the user, but the code will not be in the
standard format for the bots to collect.
Below is a quick tool to do this for you. Simply enter
your email address into the box below and click the button to it's right to view
your email address in its encoded form. Cut and paste the code
into your page.
The encoding technique will hide your email from all but the most sophisticated
email harvesting robots.
5. Encoding and JavaScript
A more effective technique would be to use JavaScript to output the code
when the page is rendered by the browser. The JavaScript code below
produces a button that you click on to send an email.
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript" TYPE="text/javascript">
<!--
var sendto = "commercefriends.com"
var mailid = "mail" + "to:" + "youremail@" + sendto
document.write("<FORM>");
document.write("<INPUT TYPE=\"submit\" VALUE=\"Send email\" ");
document.write("onClick=\"parent.location=mailid\"> ");
document.write("</FORM>");
// -->
</SCRIPT>
You could even save this code in a JavaScript file and use a SSI include to put it on your
website.
Given all these possible methods, I'm sure you can start to think of many more
ways to hide your email address from unscrupulous email harvesting bots.
Good luck and happy hiding!
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