Question 1

What is email obfuscation?

Accepted Answer

Email obfuscation is a technique to hide a real email address on a web page so spam bots and crawlers cannot easily harvest it, while real visitors can still see or click the address. Common methods include HTML entity encoding, JavaScript document.write, CSS direction reversal and base64 image rendering.

Question 2

Will the obfuscated email still work as a mailto: link?

Accepted Answer

Yes. As long as the browser can decode the rendered text back to the original address, clicking the link opens the user's mail client normally. The HTML entity and JavaScript versions preserve the mailto: behavior out of the box.

Question 3

Which method is most effective against spam bots?

Accepted Answer

No method is 100% spam-proof, but combining techniques dramatically reduces harvesting. HTML entity encoding stops basic regex crawlers, while JavaScript document.write and CSS direction reversal defeat scrapers that don't execute JS. The strongest option is rendering the address as a base64-encoded image.

Question 4

Is it safe to use these obfuscated addresses?

Accepted Answer

Yes. All decoding happens in the user's browser. The address is never sent to any server and the obfuscation is reversible for any visitor. You can safely use these in static HTML, blogs and email signatures.

Rendered in browser (what users will see)