As you can see from the snippet of code, the email address encoder also hides HTML coded commands as well as text. This means you can show a contact email address in a mailto: link and have less to worry about bots scraping it.
After you activate the advanced security features, links in your email might look different. For example, in some messages links might appear longer than usual, and include text such as "na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com." This is related to the checks we perform to protect you from phishing attacks.
Spam-me-not – Free Email Link Obfuscator!!
When it comes to providing an easy, spam-free way for people to contact you, nothing beats the convenience of a simple, web-based email form. If you are using WordPress, there are many contact forms available, including my clean and simple Contact Form X, which is Ajax-powered for extra awesomeness.
If you have the time, using a web-based email form is probably the best solution for contact pages, but if you just need a way to simply include an email address, one of those first three methods may be just the ticket for keeping your publicly displayed emails spam-free.
The real script is a bit more complicated, because I have a link to my contact formular as well as a fallback for the email address (among other things), but this is the basics. It can spoof any form field/action field and any email address, and will hide those from search engines as well as validators and scraper bots. Legit users will see the real address and form fields, others will not.
With the massive volume of emails sent each day, coupled with the many methods that attackers use to blend in, identifying the unusual and malicious is more challenging than ever. An obscure Unicode character in a few emails is innocuous enough, but when a pattern of emails containing this obscure character accompanied by other HTML quirks, strange links, and phishing pages or malware is observed, it becomes an emerging attacker trend to investigate. We closely monitor these kinds of trends to gain insight into how best to protect customers.
The following graph shows cyclic surges in email content, specifically links that have an email address included as part of the URI. Since custom URIs are such a common web design practice, their usage always returns to a steady baseline in between peaks. The surges appear to be related to malicious activity, since attackers will often send out large numbers of spam emails over the course of a campaign.
Newer variants of the May campaign started to include links in the email, which routed users through a compromised website, to ultimately redirect them to the Appspot-hosted phishing page. Each hyperlink in the email template used in this version of the campaign was structured to be unique to the recipient.
Someone using a Javascript enabled browser will see your address and be able to mail you via a standard mailto: link, however any e-mail harvesting agents will merely see an array of numbers, not even an @ sign will be visible. If you want someone without a Javascript enabled browser to email you, then you will have to either include your email, suitably camoflauged, in the noscipt tag or obfuscate it using a simpler method.
As for the code it is freeware, use it as you like. If you like let me know. If you hate let me why. Does it really reduce the amount of spam you get. Also feel free to tinker with it, because if everyone started using identical code it wouldn't take the email harvester too long to figure out where all the email address are hiding.
If you are worried about users who don't have native mail client installed, or who don't have the mailto: handler set correctly, then have a Contact Us page with BOTH the linked email address and a form (without a CAPTCHA) and let the user choose.
What I do is write out the email address as words, wrapped in a span tag: joe dot blow at gmail dot com. Then a page-level script runs, grabbing any such spans and replacing each with a constructed email link. It may not be too obscure, but I've had no complaints. Plus if JavaScript is disabled, the user can still read the actual span text.
You can write "Unscramble my email: user at com dot gmail" in tags for those who have javascript turned off. This way you get the hyperlink functionality. You have a good chance at keeping spamers away from your address and people with javascript turned off or text only browsers can still get your email address.
Excellent article. Unfortunately I have to work with an undocumented proprietary content management system written in ASP. I have come up with a simple email obfuscator based on numeric character references, JavaScript and CSS. Take a look at my blog post at pixelwisedesign.com/blog/?p=40 if you are in a similar situation and cannot utilize a server side language.
Link Tracking Protection: In addition to blocking trackers in images, scripts, and other media directly embedded in emails, we can now detect and remove a growing number of the trackers embedded in email links.
Rather than report the emails to the FTC, follow multistep unsubscribe prompts, or hunt for a tiny Unsubscribe link buried in the message, most people either ignore the emails, delete them, or mark them as spam, according to a small study from the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. On average, the study found, people subscribe to 93 email lists, but 85% to 90% of the messages are never read.
Bad email practices also create accessibility concerns. When an email sender wants you to do something, it often makes the text of its request large and easy to read. But finding the little Unsubscribe button or link can feel like an unwanted treasure hunt. Neurodivergent people may give up easily if they have to make several clicks to unsubscribe from a service, our experts say. Or, people with limited vision may struggle to find the button or link in the first place. The link is often buried in the footer or the body of a long email and presented in a tiny, grayed-out font. This goes against design standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which say that most text and images should have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.
Sadly there are a number of "spambots" which roam the web "harvesting" email addresses to send spam to. Often you have no choice but to include a mailto link with an email address in a web page. Fortunately most of these spambots do not seem to have complete HTML parsers, and most do not execute JavaScript.
This free Email Address Obfuscator uses obfuscation to generate a "mailto:" link which will confuse naïve spambots, but will still work in standard browsers. It also generates an alternative version which requires a Spambot to execute JavaScript.
Mailgun is a widely used and well-known solution for email delivery issues. It uses a secure API and offers a 3-month free trial. After that, a (super competitively priced) paid plan is necessary. Mailgun offers options as low as $0.80 USD per 1,000 emails.
Notably, spammy mailing lists send the most spam. These mailing lists include sites that promise you free credit scores, or insurance quotes, or free ipads etc. These sites stink of spam, but people still continue to give them their email addresses.
You can't send email through Mailinator, and the service deletes all messages after a few hours. It also blocks all attachments in incoming messages. While Mailinator doesn't offer much for free and is blocked on many sites due to its well-known status, it's still worth a try today.
Like the above, all inboxes are public and available without signing in. You can also use an alias address to disguise the true email address. Emails received in public inboxes stick around for four days. With a free account, you can hold 50 messages in an inbox.
Addresses are permanent, but the service deletes all email after an hour. Unlike other services, GuerillaMail doesn't filter any incoming messages, so you're free to open attachments and view spam messages.
The only difference between a paid and free account you have to wait 6 seconds between each spam submittal. Enter your Full name and your Email address and click the Send authorization email button.
This should really concern you because many of these spam emails carry potential malware. When you open your mail or click on a link that contains it, the malware gets naturally downloaded to your system.
If the user has different email addresses for logging on to different types of resources, then a breach in one type of resource cannot necessarily be used against another. The threat actor has no email address or account username as a reference point to start from unless they can link all your email addresses back to your identity.
Phishing is a form of fraud in which an attacker masquerades as a reputable entity or person in email or other forms of communication. Attackers will commonly use phishing emails to distribute malicious links or attachments that can perform a variety of functions. Some will extract login credentials or account information from victims.
Deceptive phishing is popular with cybercriminals, as it is far easier to trick someone into clicking a malicious link in a seemingly legitimate phishing email than it is to break through a computer's defenses. Learning more about phishing is important to learn how to detect and prevent it.
Clone phishing attacks use previously delivered but legitimate emails that contain either a link or an attachment. Attackers make a copy -- or clone -- of the legitimate email, and replace any number of links or attached files with malicious ones. Victims can often be tricked into clicking the malicious link or opening the malicious attachment. 2ff7e9595c
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