Email Address Encoder

At a glance, your email looks the same protected or not

You publish your address on the contact page. You want to know whether it is within reach of the bots that harvest emails. You look at it on screen and it seems normal. You open the browser's developer tools and see it in full there too, so you conclude the plugin does nothing.

The protection happens in a place neither the screen nor the inspector shows you: the HTML as it leaves the server. Chrome, Safari and other browsers decode entities automatically, so the inspector shows you the original address even when it is encoded.

Email Address Encoder converts the characters of addresses into decimal and hexadecimal HTML entities. The browser displays them normally, and the process works without JavaScript. It is simple spam protection: many harvesters cannot read that code.

Where it acts as soon as you activate it

• Posts and pages: encodes addresses written as text and mailto: links.
• Excerpts and comments, which pass through WordPress content filters.
• Text widgets and navigation menus.
• [encode] shortcode: protects text you mark, such as a phone number, with link and class attributes.

The plugin hooks into filters such as the_content and widget_text. That decision sets its boundary: what does not pass through those filters is left alone.

The addresses that stay outside the filters

An email in a footer written by the theme, in an attribute or inside the <head> does not pass through those filters. This is where the editions differ:

• Free version: detects plain text in the primary filters. Addresses in attributes, HTML comments, the <head>, textareas and <noscript> elements are obfuscated by hand.
• Premium version: parses the full page and protects those same places automatically. It also brings built-in support for Advanced Custom Fields, Jetpack, WooCommerce and others.
• Inside scripts: the recommended route is still to obfuscate by hand with octal, hexadecimal or unicode escape sequences.

If you use the free version and control the theme, you have two tools: eae_encode_emails() for unfiltered output and eae_encode_str() for a specific string.

Phones, techniques and developer settings

The shortcode accepts technique with the values html, css and js, and link to create an encoded tel: or mailto: link. If you set no technique, it uses the one defined in the settings. The Premium edition adds hardened protection with JavaScript and CSS, plus improved phone number protection.

Developers can exclude addresses or pages with eae_email_callback and change the detection pattern with eae_regexp.

How to check the protection in your HTML

Installation is like any other plugin. What matters comes next:

1. Activate the plugin and go to Settings, Email Encoder.
2. Run the Page Scanner on your pages with public addresses.
3. Open the page's plain source code, without using the inspector, and search for your email.
4. If any address remains unprotected, fix it with the shortcode or the functions above.

The plugin also includes a detector in the admin bar and can notify you when it finds unprotected addresses. Its protection has a specific scope: it makes published addresses harder to read. Among its features there is no inbox filtering or blocking of form spam.

If you prefer not to publish the address

A form avoids showing the email on the contact page. In the catalog you have WPForms Pro, Fluent Forms Pro and Gravity Forms.

Keep in mind that a form can receive spam too. If you choose WPForms, Custom Captcha adds its own verification.

Email Address Encoder, point by point

Why do I still see my email in the inspector?

Because the inspector decodes entities. Check the plain source code.

Does it need JavaScript?

Encoding with HTML entities works without it. Premium's hardened protection uses JavaScript and CSS techniques.

Does it protect phone numbers?

Yes, through the [encode] shortcode, and Premium improves that protection.

What about caching?

On saving the settings it flushes the cache of several caching plugins. If yours is not among them, flush it by hand.