Ulf Schneider

Use Email address obfuscation: What works in 2026? by Spencer Mortensen to keep your email address away from spammers.

This could be a case for a web component combining multiple of the presented techniques. Unfortunately, what really works requires JavaScript, which can be an issue. My favorite pattern so far is 2.10 User Interaction, because it provides decent protection against spammers without additional library dependencies. I am using it with the Intersection Observer API and CSS class name selectors .oma for obfuscated email address and .oml for obfuscated email link.

// email obfuscation
const mObserver = new IntersectionObserver(decode)
function decode(entries, observer) {
  const parts = ["d", "o", "n", "a", "l", "d", "@", "d", "u", "c", "k", ".", "c", "o", "m"]
  for (const e of entries) {
    if (e.isIntersecting && e.target.classList.contains("oml")) {
      e.target.setAttribute("href", "mai" + "lto" + ":" + parts.join(""))
      mObserver.unobserve(e.target)
    }
    if (e.isIntersecting && e.target.classList.contains("oma")) {
      e.target.innerText = parts.join("")
      mObserver.unobserve(e.target)
    }
  }
}
function observe() {
  for (o of document.querySelectorAll(".oml,.oma")) {
    mObserver.observe(o)
  }
}
if (document.readyState == "loading") {
  document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", observe)
} else {
  observe()
}

To challenge the crawler a bit more, you could put that script into a dedicated file mail.js, and load it from inside of your head, like:

<script>
  //challenge the crawler!
  const s = document.createElement("script")
  s.src = "/js/mail.js"
  document.head.appendChild(s)
</script>

This will require the crawler to

• execute JS,
• discover the dynamic script,
• load the script, and
• execute it,

to get your email address.