Is there a way to protect my e-mail (with mailto) and phone number on my site from harvesters?

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by FashionPhotographer, Aug 3, 2013.

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  1. #1
    Hey!
    I got some strange feedback from my clients, apparently they hate contact forms and would much rather see my phone number and e-mail displayed on my contact page with a mailto link. Is there a way to do this while protecting my e-mail and number from harvesters?

    I'd like to display something along the lines of this:
    ​
    ​
    (with mailto link but in black and without any underline)​
    +41 (0) 1XXXXXXXX​
    ​
    But I'm paranoid about harvester robots. How can I put this on my page and still protect this against them?​

    Thanks guys! :)
     
    FashionPhotographer, Aug 3, 2013 IP
  2. ekim941

    ekim941 Member

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    #2
    ekim941, Aug 4, 2013 IP
  3. offthedome

    offthedome Active Member

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    #3
    Try any javascript address munger. If they don't require you to show your email address as selectable text, you can also create a png image of your email address in the right font and font size etc with photoshop.
     
    offthedome, Aug 4, 2013 IP
  4. sarahk

    sarahk iTamer Staff

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    #4
    Grow up and get decent spam filtering. I'm with your clients and don't like contact forms - I'd rather send an email where I have a copy of the initial communication - and I don't like sites where you can't copy the email address.

    I used to use this on my own site: http://www.itamer.com/obfuscate.php but that was before gmail came along and introduced decent spam filtering. I don't bother protecting any emails any more and the spam is still under control.

    We don't get much phone spam from scraped phone numbers so that hasn't been an issue but we get the old "I'm calling from Windows" but we get that just as much on our non-web-published numbers as we do on the business numbers so I'm not sure that the problem lies with scrapers.
     
    sarahk, Aug 4, 2013 IP
  5. offthedome

    offthedome Active Member

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    But there's no reason to not protect your email address. If you really want to post it out there for the world to see, even the most basic javascript address munger can do a super great job at protecting your email address.

    And ugh, given how many "we offer blanketyblank solutions that will bla bla seo" emails through a contact form from a real human that, if those senders knew my email address, they wouldn't have to ever go to my site to manually send me spam. They could just copy and paste it into some spam app that is set to send me spam every 100 hours or whatever for the rest of my life.

    Contact form is the way to go ... sucks that your client doesn't let you use that. Find a simple javascript address munger that will hard code a munged email address.
     
    offthedome, Aug 4, 2013 IP