How to obfuscate an email on a website in 2024?

Question

I'm making a simple, static website for someone's small (one-person) enterprise. We'd like to put the email on the site, but I'm a bit afraid of spammers. What are reasonable practices to obfuscate the email in 2024? I can think of at least two simple (?) approaches:"Contact me at blah(at)bleh.bloh"(which I personally don't like), or using some homoglyph (like Cyrillic "а" instead of Latin "a") and writing a simple JS function which will change it to normal, Latin "a" after e.g. the first click/keypress on the page (so that when a human actually copies the email, it is ok, but there is no visible change in its appearance).Are these ideas good? Why/why not? If not, what are better ones?Note: the person I'm doing it for does not want to change the email provider nor create any email account/alias other than what they have now.

codetrotter · Accepted Answer

Last time I made a static site for someone that needed people to be able to contact them, I put a Google Forms link on the page. Let Google deal with the spammers, and still the form is sent to the mail of the person I made the site for. Worked very well.
In the form we collect basic information like name and email address and some other relevant info. And then we also have a free-form text area where people can write whatever.
We also put the phone number of the business on the site, so that people can call by phone instead, if they prefer.

brudgers · Answer

In a business context an obfuscated email would give me pause.
Because they are making work for me.
Not helping me with my problem.
It's a tell for two scenarios. In the best case it suggests an intent to communicate "not for me" to me. More likely, there will be more hoops to jump through in the future. That's something I might want to avoid. I have the tee shirt.
the person I'm doing it for does not want to change the email provider nor create any email account/alias other than what they have now.
Ask them what they want, do what the want, cash the check. The solution is social, not technical. Good luck.

rozenmd · Answer

Don't bother, I've had mine in my footer for years now - have only had pleasant conversations as a result.

micromicron · Answer

I just use my plain text email, I've never had a problem with spam for many years

LinuxBender · Answer

In the past I used a perl cgi script and then simple regex filters to discard anything that is not alpha-numeric prior to validating input and then discarding anything that had spamish keywords or excessive spacing or lines. UTF is not alpha-numeric. Not perfect but rarely abused. Nowadays I would probably add a one-line form that asks for a free-form answer to a random question from a million question factoid database. An LLM could look up the answer but if enough people did this it would get expensive and if that became a pattern I would just give them offensive questions. Offensive to an LLM in that it would break their terms of use as spammers mostly abuse other peoples resources and rarely self-host anything.

cpach · Answer

For a business site I would either put up a contact form or just write the address out in plain text. Don&rsquo;t make the customer work to get in touch &ndash; unless you already have more work than you can handle.

sfmz · Answer

Could put it in an image; if you click the image you get a little notification 'copied to clipboard'

richin13 · Answer

I read this article a while back, it contains several alternativeshttps://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/

dyingkneepad · Answer

Wild guess: not leaving it in the html but having a javascript write it after the page loads will probably get rid of 99.9% of the scrapers. Do spiders execute javascript?

altdataseller · Answer

Don&rsquo;t overthink it. Just &ldquo;alias AT domain.com&rdquo; will get rid of 99% of all email harvesters. The other 1% will just land in your spam filter

colesantiago · Answer

rot13 or if you want to get very obtuserotx and let the reader guess what x is to perform the rot operation

KomoD · Answer

Some JS (like how Cloudflare does it) or an image is what I most commonly see.

cranberryturkey · Answer

i just use my email and let gmail hadnle the spam

How to obfuscate an email on a website in 2024?

Don't bother, I've had mine in my footer for years now - have only had pleasant conversations as a result.

I just use my plain text email, I've never had a problem with spam for many years

For a business site I would either put up a contact form or just write the address out in plain text. Don’t make the customer work to get in touch – unless you already have more work than you can handle.

Could put it in an image; if you click the image you get a little notification 'copied to clipboard'

I read this article a while back, it contains several alternatives
https://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/

Wild guess: not leaving it in the html but having a javascript write it after the page loads will probably get rid of 99.9% of the scrapers. Do spiders execute javascript?

Don’t overthink it. Just “alias AT domain.com” will get rid of 99% of all email harvesters. The other 1% will just land in your spam filter

rot13
or if you want to get very obtuse
rotx
and let the reader guess what x is to perform the rot operation

Some JS (like how Cloudflare does it) or an image is what I most commonly see.

i just use my email and let gmail hadnle the spam