Hello friends,

In this post I will present to you one very handy plugin that will help you protect your email addresses and mailto links from web-harvesting robots. This plugin is called Email Address Encoder.

What does Email Address Encoder do?

It will simply encode all of your publicly provided email addresses and mailto links into decimal and hexadecimal entities. Thus they will not be available for any nasty bots that will try to harvest them and provide them to spammers.

If you don’t have such a protection there is a risk of getting your email addresses added to email lists that can be used for several purposes. For example you may get spammed with all kinds of unwanted emails if the email list was sold to a various number of clients.

What is worse is that you can start receiving phishing messages or even messages containing all sorts of viruses. And as you know the crypto viruses are a “fad” amongst hackers nowadays. And they can be quite nasty as sometimes all of your precious data can be lost for good.

Will Email Address Encoder save me from spam permanently?

The answer to this question can be yes, but only if your email addresses and mailto links can be harvested from your website only.

And when the answer is no? Well if this information is present on another non-protected website or if someone who knows your email addresses decides to provide them to spammers.

So you have to be realistic about spam protection – if someone truly intends to spam you, there is a little chance to prevent this. However you can fight spam with a solid email anti-spam protection.

And as for Email Address Encoder – this wonderful plugin can be useful from preventing bots from getting closer to you addresses. And that is just another layer of anti-spam protection.

How does Email Address Encoder work?

By hooking into the WordPress filters and by searching for @ signs. In case such a sign is detected, the plugin will try to determine if this is an email address or a mailto link that is in plain text. If this is the case then the encoding operation begins and the email address will be protected from harvesting.

The developers of the plugin claim that the functionality provided by Email Address Encoder is faster than the built-in WordPress antispam function. Also in this case you get additional hexadecimal entities as an extra protection.

How to check if my email address is protected?

By simply viewing the source of the page where you are sure that the email address is provided. Try searching for it in plain text. If you don’t find it – you are protected!

How to achieve this protection?

By simply downloading, installing and activating Email Address Encoder. No additional settings are needed. But in case you are an experienced user and you want to filter specific parts of your website, then you can have a look at the tab: “How can I filter other parts of my site?” at the WordPress.org page of the plugin.

So there you have it, friends!

What do you think of Email Address Encoder? Will you give it a try? Share your thoughts in the comment section below. See you soon, friends!