[IPOL discuss] Email addresses visibility

[Pascal Getreuer]

I suggest as a basic solution that IPOL encodes email addresses using
character entities, for example,
  <a href="mailto:test at yahoo.com">
      test at yahoo.com
  </a>
becomes
  <a href="mailto:&#116;&#101;&#115;&#116;&#064;&#121;&#097;&#104;&#111;&#111;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;">
      &#116;&#101;&#115;&#116;&#064;&#121;&#097;&#104;&#111;&#111;&#046;&#099;&#111;&#109;
  </a>

The advantage of this approach is that the user still sees a working
clickable mail link, so for the user this is much more convenient than
retyping emails from images or dechipering captcha puzzles like
"testNOatSPAMyahoodotcom."  Also, it is more portable since no
JavaScript is required.  While a sophisticated robot could still
decode an address written in character entities, it goes a long way to
reduce exposure.

There is a good discussion and links to tools for email hiding techniques on
  http://www.ohlone.edu/org/webcenter/emailencoding.html

Best,
Pascal


On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 13:13, Miguel Colom
<Miguel.Colom at cmla.ens-cachan.fr> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> the email addresses of the authors of the articles as well the editor's
> ones are completely visible in the web page and also in the HTML source
> code of the page.
>
> Without any protection, any robot can find these addresses and start
> sending lots of spam emails to them.
>
> We should avoid that by using some simple tricks, like showing the emails
> in a format like 'user at server dot com" and generating the 'mailto:'
> field by javascript code.
>
> Regards,
> Miguel
>
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