November 27, 2023

Email Address Encoder Plugin

A lightweight plugin that protects email addresses from email-harvesting robots, by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

A lightweight plugin that protects plain email addresses and mailto links from email-harvesting robots, by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities. Has an effect on the posts, pages, comments, excerpts, text widgets and other filtered content. Works without JavaScript — just simple spam protection.

To see whether all your email addresses are properly protected, use the free page scanner tool.

Other content (like phone numbers) can be protected using [encode] shortcode:

[encode]+1 (555) 123-4567[/encode] [encode link="tel:+15551234567"]+1 (555) 123-4567[/encode]

Premium Features

Full-page protection that catches all email addresses
Hardened protection using JavaScript and CSS techniques
Improved phone number protection
Built-in plugin support for ACF, Jetpack, WooCommerce and many others

Check out the Premium version of Email Address Encoder.

Installation

For detailed installation instructions, please read the standard installation procedure for WordPress plugins.

Upload the /email-address-encoder/ directory and its contents to /wp-content/plugins/.
Login to your WordPress installation and activate the plugin through the Plugins menu.
Use the “Page Scanner” under Settings -> Email Encoder to test if your email addresses are protected.

Screenshots

Settings: Configure the plugin to your needs.
Protection: This is how email addresses will look like under the hood.
[Premium] Hardened protection: A preview of JavaScript and CSS based techniques
[Premium] Phone number protection using polymorphous ROT47/CSS

FAQ

What does this plugin do?

This plugin searches for email addresses using WordPress filters like the_content, widget_text and others. Found email addresses are encoded using decimal and hexadecimal HTML entities, which obfuscates the email addresses to protect it from being read by most email-harvesting robots.

Alternatively, you can use the [encode] shortcode: [encode]+1 (555) 123-4567[/encode]

How can I make sure the plugin works?

You can use the “Page Scanner” found under Settings -> Email Encoder to see whether all your email addresses are protected. Alternatively, you can manually look at the “page source” of your site.

Please note: Chrome’s Developer Tools, Safari’s Web Inspector and others automatically decode decimal and hexadecimal entities. You need to look at the “plain HTML source code”.

How can I filter other parts of my site?

This guide will help you encode all email addresses that aren’t caught.

Changelog

1.0.23

Fixed potential XSS vulnerability when using link shortcode attribute

1.0.22

Added link attribute to [encode] shortcode

1.0.21

Changed page slug to avoid issues with the encode keyword
Only search for unprotected emails on public pages
Show warning when page couldn’t be fetched

1.0.20

Encode emails in navigation menus

1.0.19

Defer loading of email detector script
Use plugin version as cache buster
Add “Polymorphous ROT47/CSS” to techniques

1.0.18

Show warning when incompatible plugins are installed
Fixed saving of dismissed notices

1.0.17

Offload email detection to web worker
Flush WP Super Cache and Cachify when saving settings
Ignore emails in admin bar, debug bar and query monitor

1.0.16

Avoid fatal error when using PHP 5.5 or lesser

1.0.15

Added EAE_REGEXP constant
Added eae_email_callback filter
Added unprotected email detector to admin bar
Respect eae_method filter in shortcode
Fixed issue with notices not hiding in some cases
Flush page cache when saving settings (W3 Total Cache; WP Rocket; LiteSpeed Cache; JCH Optimize)

1.0.14

Fixed Dashboard JavaScript issue
Blocked signup for more non-production domains

1.0.13

Resolved issue with WordPress 4.7 and older
Blocked signup for local domains and IP addresses

1.0.12

Avoid fatal error when using PHP 5.3 or lesser

1.0.11

Added the ability to get notified when your site contains unprotected email addresses
Made EAE_DISABLE_NOTICES check stricter
Removed cross-promotion

1.0.10

Added option to disable notices and promotions
Added activation and uninstall callbacks
Added $hex parameter to eae_encode_str() method
Added ability to turn off email encoding
Various code and UI improvements

1.0.9

Made page scanner notice dismissable
Only show page scanner notice on Dashboard
Added setting for filter priority
Added EAE_DISABLE_NOTICES constant to disable all notices and promotions
Pass site URL along to page scanner
Moved cross-promotion to plugin screen

1.0.8

Added user interface
Added links to page scanner

1.0.7

Prevent potential compatibility issue with other plugins or themes

1.0.6

Added [encode] shortcode
Require PHP 5.3 to fix deprecation warning

1.0.5

Prevented error when eae_encode_emails() doesn’t receive a string

1.0.4

Added EAE_FILTER_PRIORITY constant to adjust default filter priority

1.0.3

Added filter to override the encoding function
Improved randomness of encode-function
Improved speed by doing fast @-sign existence check

1.0.2

Added filter to override the regular expression.

1.0.1

Effects now also page, post and comment excerpts

1.0

Initial release