Obfuscate Email Address to Hide from Spam Bots

We often share our e-mail address on Web for triggering communication with readers. But, Putting your plain e-mail address on any page is full of risk if you are not ready to handle spam.

There are a number of bad spam bots which are always active and looking for publicly available e-mail addresses on the Internet, and then they add you to their mass mailing lists which may flood your Inbox with mails probably you will not happy with. Webmasters are more closely

There is a little trick which may help you in obfuscating your e-mail in such a way that readers can get it easily, but spam bots can't. This is nothing but writing the address using HTML entity codes. This is not something strange. If you are familiar with HTML codes, you might be already knowing this.

Example

Original Address -

[email protected]

Obfuscated version -

[email protected]

Use in pages [mailto: code]-

<a href="mailto:[email protected]"> [email protected] </a>

Here I have replaced random characters with equivalent HTML codes. You might be thinking, why I have not replaced all characters of the string? If you replace all characters, then the pattern would be easily guessed even by some dumb bots.

Though this is not a full proof method of preventing spam, it will definitely reduce no of hits to your Inbox However, some smart bots and search engines can de-obfuscate your contents to index them.