Disguise Email

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Disguise Email

UNFORTUNATELY, UNLESS YOU ARE USING GOOD ENCRYPTION OR PHP CODING TO DISGUISE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS, IT WILL BE TAKEN BY SPAMBOTS!

Spiders crawl the web for good reasons (like search engines) and for bad reasons (like spammers that harvest email addresses). If you publish your email address on your website, you need to protect it.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you use a secure PHP form that does not publish your email address to the web in any format.

If you do not want to use a secure PHP script/form the the best suggestions I can offer you are below but they are NOT your best option. Your visitor will only see user@domain.com and will never know that you did anything special.

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Do nothing, and your email address is vulnerable and will be grabbed: user@domain.com

~~At the very LEAST, everyone should be disguising the~~ @ ~~symbol in the email address. You can replace the @ symbol with the HTML equivalent~~ ~~@~~ ~~so the address you type in would be~~ ~~user~~~~@~~~~domain.com~~

~~This is a very minor change but still confuses some spambots. Requires no special coding.~~ THIS RARELY WORKS NOW (01/06)

Type out your email address in words: user at domain dot com

That address would never be picked up, but it also can not be made into a link. Your visitor would have to manually type the address into the email program so it's not a great choice.

Add extra characters to your address: user@domain-REMOVETHIS-.com

That address would be picked up. Some bots will understand it and will remove the -REMOVETHIS- leaving your real address. Can be made into a link. Your visitor would have to manually adjust the address in the email program.

Use an online email OBFUSCATOR to create a piece of code that combines two kinds of characters to confuse spambots. Use MIXED setting on this site to generate email links that are more secure.

Put your email addresses behind a password protected entry page, or require CAPTCHA (the little distorted image) to access your email address. This will slow down or deter spambots depending on the difficulty level for the password protection or captcha image provided. Take a look at this online tool that encrypts your email link and adds an extra user challenge (captcha image). Note that this technique may irritate your visitors by adding one more step before emailing.

Use Dynamic Drive's Email Riddler (seen in the frame below) to disguise your email address. This produces a piece of code that is placed into a webgem/Insert > HTML. This is great for stand alone links (text or image), but doesn't work with forms you may have on your site.

Place your email information into the form and press button to encrypt.

Now to place that encrypted information into your CSB webpage!

TEXT LINK:

Simply place the code generated by the DD into an insert > HTML (webgem in Trellix).

IMAGE LINK:

Place the code generated by the DD into an insert > HTML (webgem in Trellix).

Adjust the code like this: <img src="yourimage.gif"> to <img src="^GEMDIR/yourimage.gif">

Replacing yourimage.gif with the image you want to use. Mine is email.gif

Place your image into the webcomponents (gemfiles in Trellix)

Make sure the image name in the code is EXACTLY like the real image name.

Second Example:

I added two snippets to this code to make it even better!

Notice the placement of the new pieces!

1) onfocus="this.blur()" This snippet removes the dotted line around the image after clicking link.

Place it immediately following your subject=message quote.

2) border=0 This snippet removes the border around the image.

Place it immediately following your image name quote.

This is the code I had generated, with my changes added for reference:

/***********************************************

* Encrypt Email script- Please keep notice intact.

* Tool URL: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/emailriddler/

* **********************************************/

var emailarray3119= new Array(115,97,109,114,99,50,64,109,105,110,100,115,112,114,105,110,103,46,99,111,109)

var postemail3119=''

for (i=0;i<emailarray3119.length;i++)

postemail3119+=String.fromCharCode(emailarray3119[i])

document.write('<a href="mailto:'+postemail3119+'?subject=message from the website" onfocus="this.blur()" ><img src="^GEMDIR/email.gif" border=0></a>')

</script>

Want to use the image? Right click on it and SAVE PICTURE AS.

Use West Bay Web's Email Encoder to translate your entire email address from ascii into its equivalent decimal entity. Instead of putting user@domain.com into your link, forms, etc, the converted address is used instead: user@domain.com

Requires no special coding.

Place your email information into the form and press button to encrypt.

Now to place that encrypted information into your form or link, or anywhere you would have typed your email address!