How to Obfuscate Your Email Address on the Web

Introduction

Web crawlers (spiders), deployed by spammers, constantly scrape the web for new email addresses to victimize. You can hide your email address in plain sight by encoding it in a way that web-crawlers are less likely to understand.

Instead of writing your email address in familiar ASCII characters, you can write it as *decimal equivalents of* ASCII characters.

My email address is:

Email: cwmiller@buffalo.edu

If you view this document's HTML page source, you'll see that my email address string is written as its equivalent series of ASCII decimal values:


99 119 109 105 108 108 101 114 64 98 117 102 102 97 108 111 46 101 100 117 

Next, I formatted these ASCII decimal values to turn them into my email address:

Email: <a href="mailto:&#99;&#119;&#109;&#105;&#108;&#108;&#101;&#114;&#64;&#98;&#117;&#102;&#102;&#97;&#108;&#111;&#46;&#101;&#100;&#117; ">&#99;&#119;&#109;&#105;&#108;&#108;&#101;&#114;&#64;&#98;&#117;&#102;&#102;&#97;&#108;&#111;&#46;&#101;&#100;&#117;</a>

Use this conversion tool to convert your email address to its equivalent ASCII decimal value.

References

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii
  2. http://www.easycalculation.com/ascii-hex.php