Keeping your email private

I usually avoid "email" links in order to keep these addresses being collected by harvesting bots, which might result in an increase in the amount of spam at is sent to the harvested email address.

In order to avoid being collected, developers have moved away from creating email links and instead have opted for just visually presenting the address in many different ways. Although this might prevent the address being harvested, it eliminates the convenience and usability for your visitors. After all, you want your visitors to easily use your website, specially if you want them to contact you.

Over the weekend I came across Lucian Slatineanu’s blog Badboy Media and specifically his "Hide yourself" entry where he Lucian discusses the same issue and provided a javascript function that provides the best of both worlds: usability and keeping your email address private from bots.

Based on the comments on his entry, there was a need to be able to use the same functionality but for multiple users. I had a few minutes to spare and I was able to makes some changes to his original function to allow you to hide more than one email address with the same piece of code.

Check out the working demo and the source if you are further interested in the script.

3 Comments for “Keeping your email private”

  1. I found this a while back and thought it might be another example to aid this topic. Check out this link:

    http://www.alistapart.com/articles/spam/


  2. I made some minor modifications to your solution because I am probably more paranoid than your normal fellow. I don’t even want to put the email in the span as user(at)website.com. My changes justs move the email address info to the javascript. Take a look and let me know what you think.


  3. Hi, I’m working on a derivate version of this JavaScript. I want to use it on a Content Manager System (CMS) that I am currently writing. I wander if there is a license for your JavaScript and if so, witch license is that ?
    If I may use that derivate version of this JavaScript, of course, I will give the apropriate credits in the CMS license (that is a GNU General Public License).


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