PROTECT YOURSELF FROM EMAIL SPAM
If your email address is publicly available on a website, it will be vulnerable to email spammers who use email harvesting programs or spambots to collect email addresses and send unsolicited email. To disguise your email, the most simple method is to manually convert the symbols in an email address to words that are typically parenthesized. For example, lori@mac.com becomes lori(at)mac(dot)com. Harvesters will ignore this invalid email format. The drawback to this method is that this format is time consuming, and it will not be a link or allow readers to click on the email address to launch their email application to quickly write to you.
A better method may be to obfuscate the address using a combination of HTML character entity or hexadecimal and/or ISO characters in place of the letters which comprise the email address. For instance, the letter a in an address becomes #a. The browser will read the HTML correctly but the harvesters will not be able to. Obfuscate means
- to confuse, bewilder, or stupefy;
- to make obscure or unclear: to obfuscate a problem with extraneous information.
Seowebsitepromotion provides a free online encoder. The user inserts the email address and selects ISO, Hex, or mixed output to generate an email address which remains transparent to the majority of email harvester robots. The web page coder needs to insert the obfuscated email address into the appropriate posting’s code. The advantage of obfuscating the email address is that the reader will be able to quickly launch the email address by clicking on it.
Many Wordpress plug-ins exist to obfuscate email addresses in your posts and pages. Design Oahu provides an obfuscate version that does not use Javascript. It does allow users to launch their email program by clicking on email addresses.
The How To Disguise Your Email by MainHeading, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.