How to Hide your Email Address on Web Pages

You have a website, you want to put your email address on the site so that people can contact you easily but you are also worried about spam flooding your mailbox once your email address begins to appear on a public web page.

Your concern is valid. The email harvesting bots, using simple regular expressions, will most definitely find your email address if it’s published in plain text but you may trick the less-clever bots by hiding your email address through simple CSS and JavaScript based techniques.

1. Hide Email through CSS

1a. CSS pseudo-classes

You can use the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements in CSS to insert the email username and domain name on either sides of the @ symbol. The bots, which are generally blind to CSS, will only see the @ sign while browsers will render the complete email address which, in this case, is john@gmail.com.

<style>
  email::after {
    content: attr(data-domain);
  }
  email::before {
    content: attr(data-user);
  }
</style>

<!-- Set data-user and data-domain as your 
       email username and domain respectively --> 

<email data-user="john" data-domain="gmail.com">@</email>

The downside with the above approach is that users won’t be able to select and copy your email address on the web page, they’ll have to write it down manually.

If you would prefer to use pseudo-elements but with a more user-friendly style that allows selection, you can try an alternate approach with all the email characters but the “@” symbol are selectable.

<style>
  .domain::before {
    content: "\0040";    /* Unicode character for @ symbol */
  }
</style>

john<span class="domain">abc.com</span>

1b. Reverse the direction

You can write your email address in reverse (john@abc.com as moc.cba@nhoj) and then use the unicode-bidi and direction CSS properties to instruct the browser to display the text in reverse (or correct) direction. The text is selectable but the address would copied in reverse direction.

<style>
  .reverse {
    unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
    direction: rtl;
  }
</style>

<!-- write your email address in reverse -->
<span class="reverse">moc.cba@nhoj</span>

1c. Turn off ‘display’

You can add extra characters to your email address to confuse the spam bots and then use the CSS ‘display’ property to render your actual email address on the screen while hiding all the extra bits.

<style>
  z {
    display: none;
  }
</style>

<!-- You can add any number of z tags but they'll stay hidden -->
john<z>REMOVE</z>@abc<z>REMOVE</z>.com

2. Obfuscate Email through JavaScript

2a. Using the ‘onclick’ event

You can create a regular mailto hyperlink for your email address but replace some of the characters – like the dot and the @ sign – with text. Then add an onclick event to this hyperlink that will substitute the text with the actual symbols.

<a href = "mailto:johnATgmailDOTcom" 
   onclick = "this.href=this.href
              .replace(/AT/,'&#64;')
              .replace(/DOT/,'&#46;')"
>Contact Me</a>

2b. Random Array

Split your email address into multiple parts and create an array in JavaScript out of these parts. Next join these parts in the correct order and use the .innerHTML property to add the email address to the web page.

<span id="email"></span>

<script>
  var parts = ["john", "abc", "com", "&#46;", "&#64;"];
  var email = parts[0] + parts[4] + parts[1] + parts[3] + parts[2];
  document.getElementById("email").innerHTML=email;
</script>

3. WordPress + PHP

If you are on WordPress, you can also consider using the built-in antispambot() function to encode your email address. The function will encode the characters in your address to their HTML character entity (the letter a becomes a and the @ symbol becomes @) though they will render correctly in the browser.

<?php echo antispambot("john@abc.com"); ?>

You can also encode email addresses in the browser.

Finally, if you really don’t want spam bots to see your email address, either don’t put it on the web page or use Google’s reCAPTCHA service. It hide your email address behind a CAPTCHA – see example – and people will have to solve it correctly to see your email address.

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This story, How to Hide your Email Address on Web Pages, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 04/01/2014 under Css, Email, Internet