My suggestion is simply an alternative approach. No need to hire a team of engineers, interior designers, and architects, to bang in a nail, when you can simply use a hammer. Sometimes its easy to over complicate things with little to no benefit over selecting the simple route in the first place. That is of course an assumption on my part, but from personal experience we know it works and works well. Regarding your above question, if the bot is seeking a mailto string it would find it, same as any other, but the address is far from plain text so would probably drop it (length of the subsequent address string being a factor, probably exceeds the length for storage). Often you have no choice but to include a mailto link with an email address in a web page. There are a number of spambots which roam the web harvesting email addresses to send spam to.

There are no visible changes to your website for visitors. Trouble is Fred there are many types of bots, some use OCR, others more akin to a harvesting approach, others just scan for domains and operate from a dictionary, some are simple, others very advanced, and now with AI I’d imagine some are utilising that approach too. By using this Email Address Obfuscation tool, email addresses on your web page will be obfuscated (hidden) from bots, while keeping them visible to humans. If your host does not do this then maybe its worth going with another…? If they can’t stop spam what else do they fail to stop… These lists are updated by the second, we know we incorporated them as a hosting provider. Most hosts implement multiple blacklists that stop the spam before it even gets to your mailbox… Standard practice. I must add, don’t use an address like or as most scripts, once they locate a site, have a list of common address’s that automate sending of unsolicited mail to… Therefore if these common address strings are used, regardless of what you do, you will get spammed!įurther. We have a Client who had constant issues with spam and the above link stopped it once a new address was used to replace the compromised address ( we could not convince this Client to switch hosts, reference to my edited addition below). Newer spambots will see through the CSS method, infact some are remarkably advanced! We used CloudFlare to obfuscate E-mail address’s that were on public facing sites, never suffered spam, but for those who don’t use CloudFlare the above works really well. Lot easier way to do it here (not JavaScript either).

Email obfuscator