Email obfuscation

16 February 09 ,

Everyone hate spam. It’s personally annoying and it also takes up space on the internet’s infrastructure. But at the same time, it’s necessary to have your email address out there on your website so people can easily contact you.

Solutions

There are a couple of methods I’ve been employing to resolve this conflict. The first, which I use for sites where there are only one or two addresses in one or two places, is simple obfuscation. This involves encoding the email address so that end users will see it normally, but spam-bots will see something like:

nabrown78@gm
ail.com

Hopefully this throws them off, and they are unable to harvest the email address. This is what I use on my own site, and it seems to work pretty well.

The other solution uses an excellent JQuery plugin. This method is great if there are going to be multiple email addresses that could be anywhere on the site. With this, you simply enter the email address like so in textpattern:

%(email)nabrown78(at sign here)gmail.com%

Normally, the end user will see a nicely-formatted email link. In case javascript is turned off, the email address is still interpretable.

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