Mail obfuscation

[chokk]

Hey all,I'm working on a project where an e-mail will be displayed and a mailto function attached to it.How do I prevent spambots getting hold of the mail?I thought of using JS, but JS enabled spambots can see right through it.Any ideas?

[Dilated]

Hey all,I'm working on a project where an e-mail will be displayed and a mailto function attached to it.How do I prevent spambots getting hold of the mail?I thought of using JS, but JS enabled spambots can see right through it.Any ideas?

If you're talking about a mailto link, you can encode every character in the address as an entity. For example:

mailto:foo@foo

becomes:

& #109;& #97;& #105;& #108;& #116;& #111;& #58;& #102;& #111;& #111;& #64;& #102;& #111;& #111;

edit: Ugh, there's no real way to put entities here. Just ignore the spaces in between the ampersands and numbers.A simple php script could encode an address for you:

$email = 'mailto:foo@foo';$encoded = '';for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($email); $i++)    $encoded .= ''.ord($email[$i]).';';

Some bots might still be able to recognize that as a mailto link even if they're only looking at markup. In short, I don't think there is an exceptionally reliable way to obfuscate an email address. Dynamic insertion of the email address through JS would probably be effective, but you're right, if the bot is looking at the actual computed DOM, it wouldn't matter.But, maybe you wouldn't be inserting an @href. Maybe you could do something like:

[a link].onclick = function() {   window.open(String.fromCharCode(109)+String.fromCharCode(97)+etc); //make this extremely convoluted in case its reading raw scripts?  };

But of course, as a side effect, the email link would only work with JS.

[Synook]

You could just use the server to send the mail instead...