Preventing email spam without using a lame contact form

Contact forms suck. But so does the email spam that happens when you post your raw email address on your website.

Fortunately, there’s a really easy way to make that go away.

Encoding your email address

Encode your email address into character entities. This transforms an email like some@email.com into some@email.com.

This renders as a readable characters to your visitors (including those with screen readers), but looks like gibberish to a spam bot.

It’s not just for email, either. You can encode phone numbers, too.

There’s a free online tool you can use. If you’re a WordPress user, you can also use their native antispambot() method. I wrote a plugin for using it in the text editor.