Plan Left

Contact Camo protects email addresses by obfuscating or completely hiding them in both the source code and the DOM.
<h3>What Is It?</h3>
Contact Camo is a plugin for WordPress developed by Plan Left that effectively hides or obfuscates email addresses from scammers, web scrapers and internet bots to help minimize spam and other nefarious, automated actors.
In addition to protecting email addresses, Contact Camo also provides some granular control over how those protected email addresses can be displayed and interacted with by users that are very useful to site builders and also help make site maintenance easier.
<h3>Example Use Cases</h3>
<ul>
<li>Educational Organization with large faculty directories</li>
<li>Nonprofits who need to be accessible without displaying in-content email addresses</li>
<li>Large Organizations who have departmental pages and points of contact but don’t want to maintain multiple contact forms</li>
<li>Anyone who doesn’t want to expose email addresses to the scammers, scrapers and bots of the internet.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Why Did You Make This Plugin?</h3>
We work with many non-profits and educational organizations that need to list contact info in directories on their website. Due to the public visibility of these and their large user base, our clients web properties are under constant threat from spammers and bots. We wanted to ensure that their user directories were safe from these threats while still being functional to visitors. In other words, we needed to hide a bunch of email addresses from the outside world while still allowing the outside world to contact those users via their email address. When we got to developing this plugin, we knew we had to provide a solution that was as bulletproof as possible while allowing our clients and customers the most amount of control over things as practical.
<h4>Ultimately, we needed to create a plugin that would:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Optionally hide or obfuscate email addresses from scrapers and bots securely and confidently. For our use case, email addresses needed to be obfuscated in the source code, the DOM, and in HTTP requests. We took the email address out of the client-side equation completely by just tucking it safely away in the database in a lookup table instead of providing a workaround that simply disguises the email address. We essentially took the email address to a safe house and sent out its representative to interact with the outside world on its behalf. Nobody gets the email, not no way, not no how, see?!?</li>
<li>Provide users with lots of control over the UX of protected email addresses, but without the need for cumbersome configuration. We decided a shortcode with some good options and sensible defaults would foot the bill for most users.</li>
<li>Be performant in capabilities, lightweight in footprint, and opinionated in scope.</li>
</ul>
The client was very pleased with the end-result and so were we. So, we decided to offer it back to the community. Our development team reviewed and scrutinized the existing plugin, found areas for improvements and further customizations, and baked them right in for everyone to use.
<h3>Who Is It For?</h3>
Site administrators and content editors/moderators. Anyone with a WordPress site that would like the peace of mind of knowing that their user’s email addresses are safely hidden from spam bots and other unintended consumers with ill intent. Content creators that don’t want to worry about the complications and time expenditure of dealing with and managing their user base getting spammed from their platform. And especially when any of the above mentioned require some level of control over what’s displayed to their users, who may very well be their customers or clients or patients, etc…It’s for site builders that want protection AND customization without being overwhelmed.
<h3>What Problems Does It Solve?</h3>
Contact Camo hides or obfuscates email addresses in the source code AND the DOM. Not only this, it ensures the unobfuscated email address is never used in any page or ajax request from its originating context; all handling/processing is done server-side. Once obfuscated, the client-side never sees the original email address again (where obfuscated). The obfuscation (key) is a hash that is stored in a lookup table with the original email address.
A few of the limitations we found in some existing (but great) plugins:
<ul>
<li>email address only obfuscated in DOM, but not in source code</li>
<li>email address only obfuscated in source code, but not in the DOM</li>
<li>integrating with a 3rd-party service that scrapes entire pages and performs a search-and-replace of email addresses with obfuscated versions in the source code</li>
<li>email address obfuscation using only html entities replacement</li>
<li>few options for control ling output</li>
<li>no contact form or fallback options</li>
</ul>
<h3>How Does It Work?</h3>
Contact Camo provides a simple shortcode that can be used to manually obfuscate or hide email addresses and control how those email address are presented back to the end-user.
This shortcode’s eventual default output is a clickable link with the obfuscated email address’s generated hash stored in a data attribute. On click, this hash is used to lookup the email address (or generate and store a new hash in your database for that email if one doesn’t already exist) and then open the browser’s configured email client with the “To” field pre-populated with the corresponding email address.
The shortcode accepts several parameters for overriding the default output. Output a button instead of a link, add CSS classes, change the text output, etc… The sky’s the limit for display.
The shortcode also has parameters for displaying an embedded contact form or an optional modal popup contact form instead of a clickable link that opens the browser’s default email client.
<h3>What is Hide vs Obfuscate?</h3>
For our plugin, we wanted to give site administrators the option to either completely hide the email address and never let any end content consumer see any piece of the email, or to hide the email until requested and reveal it in context after a specific action is taken.
<ul>
<li>Hiding the email address: The site visitor will never see the email address, and instead only be presented a popup contact form that submits and mails through ajax. This option totally hides the email, and it will never be revealed unless the emailed recipient emails the form submitter back.</li>
<li>Obfuscating the email address: The site visitor will not see the email address until the contact button (or link) is clicked. On click, the email address will be revealed and the visitor can copy or mail to that address.</li>
</ul>
<h3>What Can I Do With It?</h3>
We chose to err on the side of simplicity, balanced with enough options as to be useful. To this, we default to an anchor tag output, or – if overridden – a clickable button. We give the user control over which of these as well as css classes and an id. The text output is configurable. And with one option, you can have a modal contact form popup when users click on your link. All without showing the email address you want to use, but hide. Hide for real for real. The plugin includes template files if you wish to really change the output, like maybe you want a different wrapper, or need to include some custom data attributes for javascript to use. We thought about adding all that level of configuration to our shortcode, but figured if you were at that point, you’d probably also know how to edit a template file 😉
<h4>Basic Usage:</h4>
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com"]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a basic anchor tag with default text
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" label="Contact Us" form=true button=true]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a clickable button with text that says “Contact Us”.
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" label="Contact Us" form=true button=true popup=true]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a clickable button with text that says “Contact Us” that, when click, pops up a modal contact form
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" subject="ContactCamo" class="mail-icon-lg mail-link"]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a link with default text typographically styled along with an inline mail icon
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" id="one-contactcamo-to-rule-them-all" label="Fly, You Fools!" button=true class="btn btn-lg btn-lt-blue mail-icon-sm"]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a large, light blue clickable button with text that says “Fly, You Fools!” along with an inline mail icon
<h4>Shortcode Parameters</h4>
<ul>
<li>
email required string 
the email address to be obfuscated
</li>
<li>
label optional string default=”Email” 
the text output
</li>
<li>
subject optional string 
the text to populate mail subject lines
</li>
<li>
class optional string 
the css class(es) to add to the anchor/button html output, space delimited
</li>
<li>
id optional string 
the css id to add to the anchor/button html output
</li>
<li>
form optional boolean default=false 
if true, output contact form in place of link
</li>
<li>
popup optional boolean default=false 
if true, output link that opens modal contact form on click
</li>
<li>
button optional boolean default=false 
if true, output link as a clickable button instead of an anchor tag
</li>
</ul>
There is also an admin page for Contact Camo. From this page, you can configure where the contact form redirects after form submission.

Contact Camo

Contact Camo protects email addresses by obfuscating or completely hiding them in both the source code and the DOM.

Scott Reilly

Obfuscate email addresses to deter email-harvesting spammers, with a focus on retaining the appearance and functionality of email hyperlinks.
“Obfuscation” simply means that techniques are employed to modify email address strings that appear on your site in such a way that bots scraping your site are unable to identify those addresses; however, at the same time those emails addresses should still look and work correctly for visitors, as much as possible.
The plugin allows for use of one or more (or all!) of three techniques for email protection that have proven themselves in the past. While techniques abound for email obfuscation, the three techniques included provide the best balance of email address protection with minimal impact on visitors. You can decide on a technique by technique basis which ones you’d like to employ as some have potential drawbacks. The plugin’s settings page allows you select which techniques to use.
Ultimately, your best bet would be to not publicly expose an email address and to offer a contact form as an alternative means of contact. Or you can just accept that email addresses will get scraped and spammed, and rely on an email service that is good at filtering out spam. But this plugin is here for you if you want to employ the most reasonable means of making email harvesting difficult for your site.
See Filters section for <code>c2c_obfuscate_email_filters</code> for complete list of filters that are processed.
Please read the Details section of this documentation to learn more about the techniques employed.
<h3>Details</h3>
The email obfuscation techniques included in this plugin were chosen for their effectiveness and general applicability with minimal impact on users. I urge you to read about an <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180908103745/http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-mail-addresses-compared/" rel="nofollow ugc">experiment</a> performed by Silvan Mühlemann in which he protected email addresses using nine different techniques. He ensured the page containing those email addresses got indexed by Google and then waited 1.5 years. During that time he measured the amount of spam received to each of the email addresses. (Note: this experiment came out a few years after this plugin was originally created, but at this point was conducted over 10 years ago. Its conclusions may not apply as strongly today.)
Three techniques stood out as having received zero spam emails during that time. Two of those three techniques are included in this plugin. The fourth of his techniques is also included even though it did get a very small amount of spam — the technique was still very effective and more importantly does not rely on users to have CSS or JavaScript enabled.
The techniques are as follows. Two are enabled by default. Weigh the requirements against what you’re comfortable requiring of visitors in order for them to see and make use of email addresses you post on your site.
(For all the examples below, assume you have the link <code><a href="mailto:person@example.com">person@example.com</a></code> in your post.)
<h4>Using CSS display:none</h4>
<ul>
<li>
How does it work? Garbage text, wrapped in span tags, is inserted into any displayed email addresses. Using CSS, the text gets hidden so that visitors see the email addresses as intended. Email scrapers don’t typically utilize a CSS engine to help determine how text would look onscreen.
</li>
<li>
Uses CSS? Yes, which means if a visitor does not have CSS enabled, the emails will appear with extra text in them.
</li>
<li>
Uses JavasScript? No.
</li>
<li>
Can visitor copy-n-paste the link from onscreen text without needing to make modifications? Yes (unless they have CSS disabled).
</li>
<li>
Does this protect email addresses appearing in mailto: links and within HTML tag attributes? No.
</li>
<li>
How effective is this? In the aforementioned experiment, no spam emails were received when using just this technique.
</li>
<li>
Example
<pre><code><a href="mailto:person@example.com">person@nullexample.com</a>
</code></pre>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Replacing the `@` and `.` characters</h4>
<ul>
<li>
How does it work? The <code>@</code> and <code>.</code> characters are replaced with alternative strings, such as <code>AT</code> and <code>DOT</code>, respectively. The exact replacements are configurable on the plugin’s settings page. By default, if you don’t specify custom replacements, the plugin will use entity substitution (<code>@</code> becomes <code>@</code> and <code>.</code> becomes <code>.</code>).
</li>
<li>
Uses CSS? No.
</li>
<li>
Uses JavasScript? No.
</li>
<li>
Can visitor copy-n-paste the link from onscreen text without needing to make modifications? No, though it should (hopefully) be clear to the user what they need to replace.
</li>
<li>
Does this protect emails appearing in mailto: links and within HTML tag attributes? Yes, though if you specify custom replacement strings visitors clicking on a mailto link will have to modify the email address that shows up in their mail program.
</li>
<li>
How effective is this? In the aforementioned experiment, almost no spam emails were received when using just this technique. As a bonus, this technique does not require the support of any particular client-side techniques (CSS or JavaScript).
</li>
<li>
Examples
<ul>
<li>Custom AT and DOT replacements
<ul>
<li><code><a href="mailto:personATexampleDOTcom">personATexampleDOTcom</a></code></li>
<li><code><a href="mailto:person@DELETETHISexample.com">person@DELETETHISexample.com</a></code></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Everything encoded (aka hexadecimal HTML entity substitution) 
<a href="mailto:person@example.com" rel="nofollow ugc">person@example.com</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Changing text direction with CSS (not enabled by default)</h4>
<ul>
<li>
How does it work? The email addresses are sent reversed in the markup. Using CSS, the text gets reversed so that visitors see the email addresses as intended. Email scrapers don’t recognize the emails in their reversed form and don’t typically utilize a CSS engine to help determine how text would look onscreen.
</li>
<li>
Uses CSS? Yes, which means if a visitor does not have CSS enabled, the emails will appear backwards to them.
</li>
<li>
Uses JavasScript? No.
</li>
<li>
Can visitor copy-n-paste the link from onscreen text without needing to make modifications? No, text copied in such a manner will be reversed. However, a right-click -> “copy link/email address” will work properly for linked email addresses.
</li>
<li>
Does this protect emails appearing in mailto: links and within HTML tag attributes? No.
</li>
<li>
How effective is this? In the aforementioned experiment, no spam emails were received when using just this technique.
</li>
<li>
Example:
<pre><code><a href="mailto:person@example.com">moc.elpmaxe@nosrep</a>
</code></pre>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>How it looks</h4>
If all techniques are enabled at once, the resulting obfuscation of the example link above is (for the full effect, view this in the page’s source or the <a href="" rel="nofollow ugc">readme.txt</a> file directly):
<pre><code><a href="mailto:person@example.com">moc.elpmaxenull@nosrep</a>
</code></pre>
However, in your browser it would appear to you as it does prior to obfuscation, and the link for the email would still work. Theoretically, however, spammers would have a somewhat more difficult time harvesting the emails you display or link to in your posts.
NOTE: (Only when using the custom replacement feature will visitors need to modify the email address for use in their email program.)
Links: <a href="https://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/obfuscate-email/" rel="nofollow ugc">Plugin Homepage</a> | <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/obfuscate-email/" rel="ugc">Plugin Directory Page</a> | <a href="https://github.com/coffee2code/obfuscate-email/" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a> | <a href="https://coffee2code.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Author Homepage</a>
<h3>Template Tags</h3>
The plugin provides one optional template tag for use in your theme templates.
<h4>Functions</h4>
<ul>
<li><code>function c2c_obfuscate_email( $text, $args = array() )</code></li>
</ul>
<h4>Arguments</h4>
<ul>
<li>
<code>$text</code> 
Required argument. The text and/or HTML that contains email addresses that you want to be obfuscated.
</li>
<li>
<code>$args</code> 
Optional argument. An array of configuration options, each element of which will override the plugin’s corresponding default setting.
<ul>
<li>encode_everything (boolean) : Encode all characters in the email address using hexadecimal HTML entity substitution?</li>
<li>use_text_direction (boolean) : Utilize CSS text direction technique?</li>
<li>use_display_none (boolean) : Utilize CSS display:none technique?</li>
<li>at_replace (string) : String to use in place of <code>@</code> in email addresses (used only if encode_everything is false)</li>
<li>dot_replace (string) : String to use in place of <code>.</code> in email addresses (used only if encode_everything is false)</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Examples</h4>
<ul>
<li>
Basic usage. Obfuscate email addresses in $text according to current plugin settings.
</li>
<li>
Override all plugin default settings when obfuscating email addresses in $text and just use text direction technique.
 true, ‘use_display_none’ => false, ‘encode_everything’ => false, ‘at_replace’ => ”, ‘dot_replace’ => ”) 
) ); ?>
<h3>Hooks</h3>
The plugin exposes one filter for hooking. Typically, code making use of filters should ideally be put into a mu-plugin or site-specific plugin (which is beyond the scope of this readme to explain).
</li>
</ul>
c2c_obfuscate_email_filters (filter)
The ‘c2c_obfuscate_email_filters’ filter allows you to customize what filters get processed for email obfuscation. The following filters are all filtered by default:
<ul>
<li>link_description</li>
<li>link_notes</li>
<li>bloginfo</li>
<li>nav_menu_description</li>
<li>term_description</li>
<li>the_title</li>
<li>the_content</li>
<li>get_the_excerpt</li>
<li>comment_text</li>
<li>list_cats</li>
<li>widget_text</li>
<li>the_author_email</li>
<li>get_comment_author_email</li>
</ul>
Arguments:
<ul>
<li>array $filters : the default array of filters</li>
</ul>
Example:
<pre><code>/**
 * Also obfuscate emails appearing in custom field values.
 *
 * @param array $filters Filters that get filtered to obfuscate email addresses.
 * @return array
 */
function change_c2c_obfuscate_email_filters( $filters ) {
 $filters[] = 'the_meta';
 return $filters;
}
add_filter( 'c2c_obfuscate_email_filters', 'change_c2c_obfuscate_email_filters' );
</code></pre>

Obfuscate Email

show definitely no effect, either on ajax-loaded content nor on simple wordpress pages...

no effect

Obfuscate email addresses to deter email-harvesting spammers.

Contact Camo vs Obfuscate Email