Comments on: Hiding an email address from spam harvesters

By: Burcu Dogan

Burcu Dogan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:11:52 +0000

This is going to work but not for long, cause the pattern still gives the spammer crawlers hints that it’s absolutely a reversed email. I think JavaScript solutions are the best when you want to provide a copy-and-pastable email address.

By: Vince Bowdren

Vince Bowdren — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:11:19 +0000

I’ve tried it out and it works immacutely in every browser I’ve tried (apparently it’s a well-supported bit of css).
But, it causes a couple of problems – for example if you copy and paste the email address (e.g. into your email client) it comes out backwards i.e. moc.rehtrebttam@retsambew.
It’s also quite difficult to select the text for copying in the first place; depends on the browser but in IE6 I end up selecting nothing or the entire page.
And the browser’s text search won’t find anything if you search for the forwards version of the email address.
But it’s the copy-and-paste thing which is a bit of a killer – if you’ve got an email address in your web page without a mailto link, then copying it is exactly what your users will want to do.

By: DotNetShoutout

DotNetShoutout — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:37:39 +0000

mattberther.com » Hiding an email address from spam harvesters…

Thank you for submitting this cool story – Trackback from DotNetShoutout…

By: Harald

Harald — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:55:22 +0000

Very nice! I’ll try this out.

By: Matt Berther

Matt Berther — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:24:28 +0000

@tim: It works in so far as the spam bots will be unable to harvest the address.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:28:34 +0000

Clever, but does it work? I mean, does it actually fool spammers?

By: Jason Haley

Jason Haley — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:32:58 +0000

Interesting Finds: January 16, 2009…

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