Have you ever typed out your email plainly on your site or another site only to get so many spam messages to your mailbox few hours later? Many people are victims of this. This unwanted spam messages comes because the site where the email address was written was not protected from malicious spam bots called email harvesters.
Most websites innocently paste emails, maybe theirs or that of clients into their posts, pages or even a contact page. Spammers use email harvesting bots to collect these emails automatically and then send unwanted messages to them or sell them to other spammers. This puts the owners of the emails at risk of receiving several spam mails daily.
As a standard practice, professional websites prefer to use a contact form rather than placing emails in plain text. Others have opted to disguise it, writing it like myemailATgmailDOTcom.
Do you want to share your email address on your website without getting caught by spam bots?This tutorial will teach you how to achieve that and to easily protect emails from spammers.
An email encoding plugin is used to achieve this.
How To Use an Email Encoder
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Email Address Encoder plugin.
The plugin works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure.
Once you activate the plugin, Email Address Encoder simply starts encoding email addresses in WordPress posts and pages, custom post types, widgets, etc.
What that means is that it converts the plain text email addresses into decimal and hexadecimal entities.
If you see the page source of your page, then you will see the email addresses encoded and protected from email harvesters.
This way when an email harvesting bot visit your page source, they will not be able to see the email addresses.
However, on the front end, the email address will still appear normal to real human users and they will be able to see the plain text email addresses in their browser window.
With this simple plugin, you need no longer worry about spam mails and can go ahead to write your email address on your site in plain text.
That’s all. We hope this article helped you protect email addresses in WordPress from spammers
