Disclaimer: We can't stop Human Spam Bots though

The Problem

We are afraid to show our email ID to our website users as we all know it definitely attracts bots.

The Broken Solution

To beat spam bots, we have used some solutions like this

email [at] example [dot] com

Even its a good idea to show it this way, There are two problems.

1. Bot can easily programmed to parse email from this format.
2. Its actually a UX pain point for users to send email.

The Real Solution

There is one way we can use to hide email address to bots but your users won't even notice it.

It is by using an Email Obsfuscator which converts your email using Character Entities. You can do this online with two clicks. Check out this online obfuscator

// Before
<a href="mailto:email@example.com">email@example.com</a>

// After
<a href='mailto&#58;ema%69&#108;&#64;%&#54;5&#120;&#37;&#54;1&#109;ple&#46;co&#109;'>email&#64;&#101;x&#97;mple&#46;co&#109;</a>

// User See
email@example.com

Yes. The code looks funny, but it works. It keeps out the bots as they are scanning the code. What I really like in the solution is it won't obfuscate all characters. Instead they leave some as normal. This makes even hard for bots to convert the entities to normal email. Pretty neat idea.

Are you using this method already? What do you think? Let me know your comments.