Email Obfuscation Tool
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Obfuscate your email address to hide it from email harvesting bots and spammers.
What is email obfuscation?
Email obfuscation is a technique used to prevent email address harvesting bots and crawlers from accessing your email id. At the same time for normal users, the email addresses would look and work correctly.
The techniques usually alter email address strings using javascript or CSS so that the bots cannot identify the correct email id.
Why obfuscate your email?
Email is still one of the popular ways used by customers to contact a company. So you should always include your email id along with other ways of communication like a phone number on your website.
Since not everyone will be interested in phone calls, especially those who live outside of your country. Adding an email id in your website helps your website visitors to contact you with ease.
While adding an email address to your website you have to make sure the harvesting bots cannot access it.
What is email address harvesting?
It is a process of collecting a larger amount of email addresses. These email addresses would then be used for spamming, bulk emailing, and even malicious activities like phishing.
How do spammers harvest email ids?
Various methods are used to harvest emails. The most popular method is collecting email ids using specialized software called harvesting bots.
These harvesting bots search the web for pages with email addresses. This process could yield thousands of addresses which can be later used for spam and bulk emails.
Countermeasures against email harvesting
There are several countermeasures available to protect from email harvesting bots. Some of the popular ones are listed below.
Contact Form
This method avoids publishing your email address in the first place. So instead of adding the address to the webpage, you add a contact form that sends email without revealing the email id.
This method has few drawbacks like users cannot use their preferred email client to compose an email. And also users cannot retain a copy of the email in their sent folder.
Images
This method involves using images to display all or part of an email address. This is a very effective method since it is not viable for spammers to extract texts from images. The disadvantage is users cannot copy the address and they have to manually type it.
Captcha
Another effective countermeasure is making users complete a CAPTCHA before displaying the email id. While this method prevents bots, it also makes normal users go through an unnecessary process.
Email Address Obfuscation
Obfuscation is modifying email id strings to prevent bots from accessing the real id. Email obfuscating provides good protection against harvesters with minimal hurdles for the users.
How to use this tool?
You can quickly obfuscate your email address using this tool. Just follow the simple steps given below:
- Add your email address in the “Enter Your Email ID” text field.
- Enter your desired link text in the “Display Text” field. If not given email id will be used as link text.
- In the “Obfuscation Type” select box, select the “Email Link” option if you want to display your email as a mailto link. Select the “Text Only” option if you don’t want a mailto link.
- Click the “Obfuscate” button to obfuscate your email address.
- Copy the obfuscated email from the textarea and paste it into the webpage where you want to display the address.
How does the email obfuscator tool work?
There are two methods used in this tool to obfuscate email ids. The “Email LInk” option uses the javascript document.write() method to output the text. This option is smooth and it doesn’t slow down the page loading.
The “Text Only” option adds span tags with random strings in-between email address characters and uses CSS to hide it from displaying.
Note: the first method needs javascript enabled in the browser. It is not really a problem since most websites nowadays rely on javascript to function.
