You're here: Home / Security /

Protect Your Email from Spammers!

May 12, 2008

One way the spammers got email addresses is, they collect email addresses from web pages. They use robots that crawl web pages and find any text like 'name@domain'.

To combat this email collector robots, make some small modifications to the emails you want to display. This will make the robots difficult to recognize your email addresses, but still readable by humans. For example, if your email is rahma.sarita@gmail.com, you might want to display it like this:

rahma.sarita @ gmail.com rahma.sarita [at] gmail.com rahma [dot] sarita [at] gmail [dot] com rahma.sarixx@gmail.com

Here's the code:

<?php
$email = "rahma.sarita@gmail.com";

/* sample 1 */
$e1 = preg_replace("/@/", " @ ", $email);

/* sample 2 */
$e2 = preg_replace("/@/", " [at] ", $email);

/* sample 3 */
$e3 = preg_replace("/@/",  " [at] ",  $email);
$e3 = preg_replace("/\./", " [dot] ", $e3);

/* sample 4 */
list($u, $h) = explode("@", $email);
$e4 = substr($u, 0, strlen($u)-2) . "xx@$h";

print "$email<br>"; /* rahma.sarita@gmail.com */
print "$e1<br>";    /* rahma.sarita @ gmail.com */
print "$e2<br>";    /* rahma.sarita [at] gmail.com */
print "$e3<br>";    /* rahma [dot] sarita [at] gmail [dot] com */
print "$e4<br>";    /* rahma.sarixx@gmail.com */
?>

Note that even this trick is useless if your mailto link still point to the original email address. Link to the modified one. Relax, a few lines of javascript will solve all problems.

Send your email to: 
<a href="javascript:mailto('rahma.sarita [at] gmail.com')">
  rahma.sarita [at] gmail.com
</a>

<script language="javascript">
function mailto(e)
{
    e = e.replace(/ /g, "");
    e = e.replace(/\[at\]/, "@");
    e = e.replace(/\[dot\]/g, ".");
    document.location.href = "mailto:" + e;
}
</script>