Regardless of whether you wanted to receive them or not, spam bots would still send you messages. To stop receiving unsolicited emails, many people use different email obfuscators with varying degrees of success.

But what exactly is email obfuscation, and is it effective in preventing these pointless emails?

What Exactly is Email Obfuscation?

It is simple to use an email obfuscation tool to make it difficult for website crawlers to record your email address and use it later. Obfuscated contacts should be challenging for bots to navigate but simple for actual users to use.

Using Obfuscation to Prevent Spam in Public Emails

You can obfuscate public emails to stop spam using the following techniques.

1. Changing Email Format

Removing or swapping out a few characters is the simplest way to make your email address unreadable to crawlers. The most popular technique is to substitute [at] for the "@" symbol.

Covering up contact information on an image is another trick that occasionally appears on simple pages. Instead of the information that would typically be in the footer of your page, the webmaster uploaded a picture of a footer with an email address.

However, it can be a real hassle for users, especially those who are visually impaired, making this approach a little stressful. Spam bots find it virtually impossible to access.

2. Using contact forms

Another well-liked technique for hiding emails is to have them removed from websites. Contact forms of all shapes and sizes have taken the place of such emails. Forms let you gather extra data in an easily readable format without giving an email address to bots (as in the example below).

3. Using Google reCaptcha

Using Google reCaptcha is a fantastic method for verifying senders. ReCaptcha successfully distinguishes between bots and humans with a high degree of accuracy. If you're not a bot, it usually appears below the "submit" button and asks you to check a box.

Obfuscating Emails with JavaScript

One of the best solutions is to use JavaScript to obfuscate an email address. With JavaScript, users still have the option to click or tap on their email to go directly to their inbox. Like contact forms or images of contact information, it takes up no space and doesn't slow down your pages.

JavaScript requires that you add a small amount of code to your website to obfuscate emails. The following is the HTML code to add a clickable email address:

It's very easy for bots to find and save the address because it's exposed, but you can easily conceal it with a little JavaScript.

Naturally, you should substitute your email address's components for "name" and "domain." The word "support" would be the "name" in our address (contact@mailSlurp.dev), whereas the word "mailSlurp.dev" would be the "domain."

Bots are becoming increasingly intelligent, and some of them can already decipher such code. Developers work hard to come up with ever-new methods of encoding such addresses without degrading the user experience.

Therefore, use JavaScript or, even better, incorporate a visually appealing reCaptcha into your website if you want to obfuscate.

Different plugins can automate the process within the appropriate frameworks. Here are some examples:

  • By using the action view-encoded_mail_to, Ruby on Rails applications can obscure emails.
  • When using ReactJS, React-obfuscate can be used to conceal not only emails but also phone numbers or Facetime links.
  • Email Obfuscator is a universal plugin that works whether users have JavaScript enabled or not.
  • Email-scramble is a different general-purpose JavaScript plugin that functions with emails and phone numbers.

Conclusion

If you want to avoid activating spam filters and having your emails mixed in with real spam, perform some email testing beforehand.