Jackals build automated bots and spiders to crawl through the world wide web looking for vulnerable email addresses to add to their spam lists. Generally, the victims are unprotected « mailto » links. MailTo links are incredibly useful and often necessary to our sites. So how do you protect them from being harvested and siphons by ne’er-do-wells?
Commonly the bots and spiders are looking for the two tell-tale signs of an email address – the « @ » and the following « . » The solution lies in finding ways to mask an email addresses from harvesters, siphons and phishers, while retaining the intended functionality of the « mailto » link. There are options like using HTML entities or using javascript, and this plugin will take care of that for you.