If you want to put an email address on a web page, and have it human readable and easy to click on to open up in a mail client you run the risk of exposing yourself to one of the sleazier sides of the internet. Spam email. There are bots out there which relentlessly hunt down email addresses so their masters can deluge you with unsolicited commercial email (or worse, virus infections).

The best solution is to never show the email address - get your users to use a “Contact Us” form or similar so that there’s nothing for the bots to find. But sometimes you can’t do that, either because of how the pages are hosted or your client simply doesn’t want you to.

So… jsNoSpam was born. 100% javascript, so all client side and easy to insert anywhere that allows you to edit raw HTML and include javascript.

The script works by doing a number of things…

  • Requires you to encode the email addresses so they never appear in a recognizable form in the script or HTML source.
  • Supports decoding the email address back to a usable format
  • Allows you to display the de-coded address on the page, or to require a user action (mouse over, click, keyboard navigation etc) before revealing the address.

Because the email address which is inserted into the page via the script is clickable and usable like any regular mailto: link would be user inconvenience is reduced to a minimum, but the effort for a bot to scrape the address is increased and hopefully as there are enough potential variants in how the script can be applied it will keep it ahead of the game.

Here is a live demo of the code in action.

The code is hosted on GitHub, and is open source and unrestricted license (though it would be great if you find it useful if you comment here). It’s been tested in as many browsers as I can and also with assistive technologies (eg NVDA) but if you do find an issue please comment (or better yet fire off a pull request for me to incorporate your fix).

On their own, the techniques used (encoding the address, requiring user intervention etc) are not new, but hopefully combined they will produce a robust enough solution for people who need this workaround.