Obfuscemail

Adding contact email to your site is a great idea to allow people to contact you easily. However, it's also a great way to put your email address on a dish for spammy web crawlers.

Obfuscemail is a simple command line utility and Node.js module to help with this issue. It generates javascript which creates nice <a href="mailto:"> links which appear and work as normal in a web browser, but are not readable by web crawlers. The actual email address is hidden by the rot13 cipher.

Installation

To install the command line utility globally:

sudo npm install -g obfuscemail

Or to install locally in an npm project:

npm install obfuscemail --save

Usage

To use in a HTML page, you must define where you want your mailto links to be injected by using the obfuscemail class (ANY element with this class will be turned into a mailto link).

Then to generate the javascript to include in this page you need to run:

obfuscemail -e "<your email>" -t "Anchor Tag Text"

You can also add an optional subject to the mailto link:

obfuscemail -e "<your email>" -t "Anchor Tag Text" -s "Subject for Email"

Obfuscemail can also be used as a Node.js module (see above for installation):

var obfuscemail = require('obfuscemail');

var js = obfuscemail.generate('[email protected]', 'Contact Me');

console.log(js);
/* This outputs an immediately-invoked function expression, which you
 * *could*, if you really wish, eval()...
 */

Example

1. Add <span class="obfuscemail">No email here!</span> to a HTML page.
2. Generate the javascript <script> tag with obfuscemail -e [email protected] -t "Contact Me!". Cut and paste it into your HTML.
3. When the browser loads the page, the span element will be replaced with <a href="mailto:[email protected]">Contact Me!</a>

FAQs

1. Why use the rot13 cipher?
   It adds the main layer of obfuscation. Bots with an email matching regex over the whole page will be fooled by this.
2. But if enough people use rot13, bots will be be written to use it too.
   Yeah, they will. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
3. Eurgh, Node.js command line utilities are horrible!
   Yeah, they are. But so's your face.