Spammers often use spambots, commonly known as "Email Harvesters" that will search the Internet for email addresses. They do this to find and collect email addresses and then send you unsolicited email.
If your email address is publicly available through your Website, it is vulnerable to these kinds of Harvesters. Below are a few simple ways you can protect yourself while still providing an email address for your visitors.
Manually can be the best way, but this is not for everyone.
WordPress Plugins can help protect email addresses from spambots.
A popular solution is to create a "throwaway" email address at free services such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Set this as your email address in your profile. WordPress makes it easy to display the address on your pages by providing a "Function" called "the_author_meta('user_email')". Within The Loop portion of your templates, just add the tag:
<?php the_author_meta('user_email'); ?>.
Another popular but simple method is to convert the symbols in an email address to words (typically parenthesized).
For example, "steve@mac.com" becomes "steve (at) mac (dot) com". Since this is not seem as a valid email, spambots normally will ignore it.
A better approach is to change the characters in an address to their HTML numeric characters or equivalent. This means the letter "a" in an address becomes "a"
The "@" symbol becomes the characters "@" And so on
Harvesters will not know what to do with these. But your browser will render them correctly.
You can use a free online encoder to encode your email address
Use RapidTables html codes Website
Or use the antispambot function built into WordPress.
Another way to disguise your email is to create an image of your email address using a image software program such as Gimp. Make it to size you need and inserting it where ever you like
But with this remember people with vision impairment will not be able to read your email address. If you use this method, provide a second form of contact, such as a "Contact Us" page.
There are many WordPress plugins that do this work automatically for you
Email Address Encoder. Disguise Email Addresses. Anti SpamBot Functions.
A lightweight plugin that protects email addresses from email-harvesting robots, by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities. By Till Krüss
An easy to use yet powerful security Plugin that stops email addresses from being harvested from your website. By WebEmailProtector
An easy to use yet powerful security Plugin that stops email addresses from being harvested from your website. By WebEmailProtector
Protect email addresses and phone numbers on your site and hide them from spambots. Easy to use and flexible. By Jannis Thuemmig
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