Protect your email addresses from spam
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Before you publish your email addresses somewhere on your webpage, blog or personal site, you should think about protecting it from spammers respectively from bots crawling the net looking for email addresses. There are several methods to accomplish this. I’ll list a few of those methods: |
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Convert the email address to Unicode characters
This was not a bad idea in the past, but also bots evolve It can just as easily interpret the special character entities #64;, #46; for the @ and the . characters respectively. A minor plus in this case is that, the user may be able to use their email client.
HTTP redirection
Write a server-side script to return "mailto:foo@host.com" link as an HTTP redirect. All modern browsers recognise this, but perhaps not many harvester bots do. This can be done with Apache’s mod_rewrite, Javascript or server-side scripting. Here is an example in PHP:
/* Will be displayed in browser like*/
/* In email_foo.php file */
<?php
header ("Location: mailto:foo@host.com");
exit();
?>
In this case the user has to follow the link and rely on their mail application to get a hold of the email address. The user has to copy the email address from the application instead of doing it directly from the webpage.
Using a JavaScript (my favorite)
/* Will be displayed in browser like*/
—- script —
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
function email(n, d) {
if(d == 1){
document.location.href=’mailto:’ + n + ‘@gmail.com?Subject=contacting from webpage’;
}
if(d == 2){
document.location.href=’mailto:’ + n + ‘@hotmail.com?Subject=contacting from webpage’;
}
if(d == 3){
document.location.href=’mailto:’ + n + ‘@someotherdomain.com?Subject=contacting from webpage’;
}
if(d == 4){
document.location.href=’mailto:’ + n + ‘@christiano.ch?Subject=contacting from webpage’;
}
}
</script>
— end of script—
however, there are several good methods, it’s almost impossible to list them all .. if you’re interested in protecting your email address using other ways, here are a few keywords to use when searching in Goggle or Bing..
Hex values
HTML Comments
Fake email
Obfuscate AJAX
CSS pseudo-element
Images
CSS unicode-bidi
CSS display be none
Flash
Forms