6/12/2023 0 Comments Email obfuscator online![]() ![]() Contact forms can be very effective and have their uses, but research shows that for many users, a contact form is a barrier to contacting you. Some clients ask for a contact form to avoid placing their email address online at all. You need to consider seriously how the risk of a genuine client failing to contact you balances against the hassle of deleting a few spam emails. Spam is a problem for you – obfuscation makes it a problem for your users. Many of the techniques, when they fail for users, won’t alert the user that there is a problem, meaning that they will think you have received their email. It is never a good idea to make it harder for genuine users to contact you. Many users still browse the web without javascript (1.1% of gov.uk users), or javascript may fail for other reasons (slow or partial page load, particularly on mobile connections script errors browser plugins …). Generally, more effective techniques cause greater usability issues. However, and more significantly, all obfuscation techniques can cause usability issues, particularly with older browsers, or with assistive technologies (e.g. Unfortunately, once one email harvester has done this, your email address will be added to spam lists and re-sold, so whilst you might see some reduction in spam initially, there’s little long-term value in a partially effective obfuscation technique. Even a brand-new, currently unbroken technique will be broken next year. Simpler or more common obfuscation techniques are trivially undone by spammers, and provide no protection. It’s like trying to hide your physical mailbox so that you don’t get pizza flyers through the door if the postman can find it, so can the pizza flyer guy. Ultimately, however, no obfuscation technique can prevent spammers from getting your email address, as whatever mechanism makes it visible for genuine users will work for spammers too. It may prevent legitimate users from contacting youĪll methods of obfuscating email addresses are a trade-off between usability on the many kinds of devices around today (from PCs to phones to screen-readers), methods of using them (clicking, copy/pasting, retyping), and effectiveness in preventing trawling of email addresses.It only prevents one means by which email addresses are added to spam lists.There are three significant issues with this approach: Many clients think they would like their email addresses obfuscated to prevent spammers finding them. Preventing spammers getting your email address from your website Obfuscation techniques Indeed, for most personal email addresses, these are the only way they will have been found. a friend who has your email address having their account hacked.a company or service you use being hacked and customer data exposed.someone you’ve given the address to selling or leaking it to a mass-mailing list.However, and most commonly, email addresses are added to spam lists due to:.Contact details can be harvested from other websites where listing contact details is mandatory (e.g.Email addresses can be harvested from your website. ![]() ![]() Consider using less common addresses such as etc. We’d advise to avoid using these most common email addresses. This means that once an address is harvested, it is re-sold to lots of spammers, and there’s limited long-term value in protecting it any more.Įmail addresses end up on these lists in a variety of ways: They buy lists of millions of email addresses from other people. How do spammers get email addresses?Ĭontrary to common belief, spammers don’t harvest email addresses. Email obfuscation isn’t effective at stopping spam, and can prevent real users from contacting you.Ĭontact forms have uses but are not a replacement for email addresses.Įffective spam filters are much more effective. ![]()
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