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Hidden Email Address

Cool Tool : February 2003

Are you tired of spambot spiders harvesting your email addresses from your website pages and adding them to their junk mailing lists?

You can try and obscure your email address by doing something like:
me at danjo dot ca
Some, but not all, of your site visitors will know that you actually mean 

Problem 1: Some people won't figure it out
Problem 2: If you try that in a form, most formmail scripts will
error out, reporting an incorrectly formatted email address.

<input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="me at danjo dot ca">

To solve the first problem, use javascript instead to write out the address correctly for your visitors. A real visitor viewing your site will outwardly be presented with a fully functional normal email link. Bots, on the other hand, which read raw code, will get the following:

document.write('<a href=\"mailto:'+a+'@'+b+'\">');

Click the email link in the box above and
view the source of this page to see that this really works!

Next, what to do with your forms? If you put the address in properly, even in a "hidden" field, your visitors won't see it unless they look at the source, but again, since bots read raw code, they will get this which gives them the email address:

<input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="me@danjo.ca">

Our regular hosting clients can take advantage of a new feature in our form mailer script which *will* allow the user to successfully use an alias in the recipient field like any of these:

value="help desk"
value="me"
value="1"

No address is visible to the site visitor nor available to bots via the code.

Using these tricks:

In your forms: Configure your desired recipient aliases and the corresponding real email addresses through the 'Configure Settings' page accessible via the 'Form Mailer' icon in your control center, then change the fields in your website forms accordingly. n.b. normal recipient addresses will continue to work as usual in your forms. The method you choose can differ from one form to another thru your site.

In your pages: Use this tool to generate the javascript coding we explained about here. Copy it from the box below and paste it into your webpage(s) wherever you want to place your email address. 

note that this cannot stop spammers from re-using an email address they have already harvested. i.e. for best results, we advise that you start fresh with a new email address. If someone else wants to post your email address on their website, only provide them your new email address if they are also protecting it somehow. Otherwise, let them use your already spoiled email address.