Protect Email Addresses on Your WordPress Site

Leaving email unprotected on your websites can open them up to being harvested by spammers. Years ago I left an email address unprotected on a website and in a very short time the amount of junk email that account received went from 0-1/day to 30+/day. WordPress has suggestions in the Codex about how to protect email from harvesters. They’re all good suggestions that would help, including substitute (throw away) emails, disguising email, images instead of text, and anti-spam email protection plugins.

One plugin that has worked well is Rot13 Email Protection. However, the author hasn’t updated the plugin for a long time and I originally ran into a bug where it would wipe out all the content on a page if there was a standard link on the page. My brother in-law modified the code to work without the bug. You can see his note in comment #20 on the author’s blog.

Just click below to download the modified Rot13 file to replace the original and easily protect email addresses on all of your WordPress sites.

rot13_email_protection.zip

The Graceful Email Obfuscation plugin looks pretty good too.

What do you use if you already have a solution?

2 Responses to “Protect Email Addresses on Your WordPress Site”

  1. Eric Peters from Christian Ministry Resources June 2, 2011 at 1:17 pm #

    Protecting email from spammers is always a good idea. For some extra protection you can use http://www.cloudflare.com/. It is easy to use, speeds up websites, and has an option to automatically obfuscate email addresses. Although, it does use JavaScript, so it is bad from an accessibility point of view.
    Eric Peters@Christian Ministry Resources recently posted… My Spiritual Gift is Looking Stupid

    • Nick Blevins June 2, 2011 at 1:34 pm #

      Thanks for posting that link. I think a lot of people use some type of JavaScript simply because there hasn’t been a lot of great plugins out there for a while.

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