You may not know it, but spammers can grab your email address right from your website. It’s sad but true.
They use programs called email harvesters that scan your website and save any email addresses. Later, they start sending you loads of spam email.
It’s a huge pain. I know I get more than enough spam, and don’t want anymore. I assume you don’t want any either.
Luckily, we can stop these email spammers.
How Do You Stop These Spammers?
To prevent spammers from grabbing your email address off your website, you can use a technique called Email Obfuscation. Basically just a complex way of saying, “obscuring email addresses.”
In essence, it is taking your email address and writing it in a way that an email harvester won’t be able to recognize it (or at the very least, make it much harder).
There are many ways to accomplish obfuscation.
Some people will use an image instead of text to display an email address.
Some people will write their email address like this: brandon [at] mywpexpert [dot] com.
And another way is to encode the email characters into characters that confuse the email harvesters.
All of these are legitimate options, but they can be difficult to implement and can take quite some time.
Who has time for that?
Instead, you can use a plugin to obfuscate your email addresses. And it will do it automatically. And for free.
Use A Plugin To Obfuscate Your Email Addresses
Email Address Encoder is a free plugin that looks through all of your posts, pages, comments, excerpts and text widgets for any email addresses or links to email addresses. It then encodes the email addresses.
To a normal user, it looks just like a regular email address. But not to a harvester
It does all of this automatically, and there is no set up needed. Just install it and voila.
Check out Email Address Encoder here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/email-address-encoder/
If you’d like to learn more about protecting your website from email harvesters, check out this article from the WordPress codex.
