Researchers just a few months ago demostrated that all you have to do is encode some part of your string as an entity, and that suffices to foil all known spam scrapers. Plus it doesn't break on non-Javascript browsers, as your example does.

Please don't use this javascript solution. You're solving a non-existant problem.

And it'll be a long time before spammers go to the trouble of decoding entities on scraped pages. After all, there are alreadly millions of addresses in "XXX@yyy.ZZZ" form on the web that don't require the CPU to decode, and they're after numbers, not quality or cleverness.

It also suffices to have at least one unusual character in your email address: my email address of <fred&barney@stonehenge.com> has never been spammed, despite appearing in numerous usenet posts and web pages. Yes, <barney@stonehenge.com> has gotten numerous hits from almost the first day the other had appeared, but never the whole thing.

In summary, write your mailto links like this: 

<a href="mailto:merlyn&#64;stonehenge.com">
Send mail to <tt>merlyn&#64;stonehenge.com</tt>!</a>

[download]
and it not only looks right, it acts right, and yet the spammers don't see it. Don't use Javascript.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

In reply to •Re: Hiding mail addresses in mailto: with JavaScript by merlyn
in thread Hiding mail addresses in mailto: with JavaScript by projekt21

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