Hide Mailto: link

Question

I have varying mailto: email address on my site which are now being hit with various harvesters and subsequently I'm being spammed.

Can anyone assist me in creating some PHP code for the following:

<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>

To prevent the address from being harvested and equally can I use this script on various email address displayed on the site?

Thanks

Answer 1

The best solution that I've found is to use a bit of javascript. You call a function, passing in the address, and it will print out the link for you. Since most bots don't process javascript, this should work for a majority of cases:

<script type='text/javascript'>
    function email(name, domain, withlink) {
        var addr = name + '@' + domain;
        if(withlink) {
            document.write('<a href="mailto:' + addr + '">' + addr + '</a>');
        } else {
            document.write(addr);
        }
    }
</script>

And then, when you want to print an email address on the site:

<script>email('myuser', 'mydomain');</script>

If you want it to make it a clickable link:

<script>email('myuser', 'mydomain', true);</script>

Note: This is untested, but it should work. There are also more advanced techniques, which some of the other answers touch on, but most of them build off of a base like this.