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I wish to display my email on my website, however I do not want scrappers to collect it. In other words I do not want to open the spam flood gates. Is there an effective way of leaving my email visually intact while thwarting email scrapping bots?

marc_s
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Zombies
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3 Answers3

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Several solutions:

  1. Wrap it into an image. Make sure you do something with the image in order bots not to be able to read it using OCR.
  2. Encode it using your custom encryption algorithm, store the encrypted text in the web page, then at page load time, use JavaScript to decode it. This might not be very secure as some bots may be able to interpret JavaScript.
  3. One of the best options is to require the user to type in a CAPTCHA code and only then redirect him/her to a separate page with your e-mail address shown.
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It is very convenient for visitors to have mailto:mail@example.com so they can click on it..

So consider other options as - publishing email address as is but using address with Google's Gmail (provides very good spam filtering) - placing "contact" form in addition to email address (but the form should be protected from spammers with captcha or some additional trick to prove as a human)

Eugene
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  • I mean that when you protect email address with javascript and user has javascript turned off (common these days with plugins like NoScript) - they see nothing instead of email – Eugene Aug 10 '12 at 12:37
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For a well thought out solution check out reCAPTCHA Mailhide. If you are willing to go with less security you could try writing your email address out like my name at domain dot com or something like that although spammers can easily write software to scrape these (and probably already have given the growing popularity of this approach).

Hmmmmm
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