What is it?

The Email Obfuscator is a product, meant for webmasters, that hides emailaddresses published on websites, so that they cannot be harvested by spambots¹.

The Email Obfuscator makes sure that your emailaddress remains clickable, just as if you were not using the Email Obfuscator at all. The only requirement is that the webbrowser of the visitor supports javascript. The Email Obfuscator generates a <noscript>-tag (with your personal text) that the few visitors without javascript-support will see.

How does it work?

Your emailaddress is encoded within the sourcecode of your website. Whenever a visitor clicks the link, a javascript function will decode the encoded text. At the moment, most spambots only interprete the sourcecode of websites and do not execute javascript functions. A spambot cannot know which javascript-function will reveal an emailaddress. This is the reason why the names of the javascript-functions do not include the words 'email'. Each hint given to a spambot is a hint too many.

For now, your emailaddress is safe when you use the Email Obfuscator. It only gets dangerous when spambots get aware of this Email Obfuscator and start searching for it or when spambots start executing every javascript function they discover.

How to use it?

Using the Email Obfuscator is completely free of charge. To use the Email Obfuscator, you will have to follow these four little steps:

Download the Email Obfuscator (including the sourcecode).
Upload file EO.js to your server, e.g. to this location:
http://www.yourdomain.org/javascript/EO.js
Inlude a link to that file in the <head>-section of the sourcecode of your pages. This can be done like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.yourdomain.org/javascript/EO.js"></script>
Add the Email Obfuscator code to your webpage every time you want to hide an emailaddress for spambots. The best way to do this is dependent on the type of website that you own. For static pages, you can use our Online Generator to generate the encoded sourcecode. If you have a dynamic website, it depends on the scripting language that you use. You should use the corresponding dynamic implementation. The dynamic way of working is more flexible when you need to change something and it keeps your sourcecode more readible han the static solution.

Dynamic Implementations

These implementations are already available:

Implementation	Author	Since
JSP Custom Tag	Geert Van Aken	V1.0.0
PHP-function	Geert Van Aken	V1.0.0
ASP-function	Ken Huysmans	V1.0.1
VB.net (inline)	Ken Huysmans	V1.0.2
VB.net (codebehind)	Ken Huysmans	V1.0.2
C# (inline)	Ken Huysmans	V1.0.3
C# (codebehind)	Ken Huysmans	V1.0.3
Textpattern Plugin	Geert Van Aken	V1.1.0

Online generator

Via this form², you can obfuscate your emailaddress to test the Email Obfuscator. You can use the results on static and dynamic websites. Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are mandatory.
If you filled in everything, press the button. Your emailaddress will then be converted to HTML-code that you can directly use within your website's sourcecode.
An example link will be created as well, so that you can test it immediatly.

Sorry, but the online generator is currently not available.

Download

EmailObfuscator_V1.1.2.zip

Disclaimer

altum does not guarantee that the Email Obfuscator is bugfree and is not responsible if the Email Obfuscator does malfunction or damages your system.

1) A spambot, sometimes called 'crawler', is a small program that searches through the sourcecode of websites, looking for emailaddresses. Every time a spambot finds an emailaddress, it 'harvests' it and stores it in a database. The result of this harvesting is an enormous quantity of emailaddresses that will be used to send spam to.

2) The information that you enter in the form will not be stored by altum. We do not keep track of your personal information via this form, so we will never contact you, unless you subscribe to one of our newsletters.

Software
- Email Obfuscator

Contact

altum
Landbouwstraat 81
2800 Mechelen
België