obfuscemail

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('[e-mail]', 'Contact Me');

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

Example

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

FAQs

• 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.
• 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.
• Eurgh, Node.js command line utilities are horrible!
  Yeah, they are. But so's your face.