How to protect my e-mail address from spambots

Question

I was wondering what rails offers to obfuscate e-mail addresses to protect it from crawlers, spambots and mail harvesters, gathering addresses to send spam.

May be I used wrong keywords, but wasn’t really able to find a gem.

I found a statistic comparing different methods to mask the mail address: http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-mail-addresses-compared/

I wrote a snippet that combines the top two methods.

The snipped isn’t mature yet, but I like to share it anyway, it might be a starting point for others facing the same issue. (One next step would be to replace already linked addresses with obscured plain text.)

Before heading on I would like to know what is best practice in rails. This is a common problem and I must have missed a gem dealing with it!?

If I use my approach, what is the best way to integrate/trigger it in my app?

Any kind of before_filter? Before rendering??? Something like that?

Or like I do it currently, calling it in the view as a helper_methode?

It could even be added to string class…

---

In my application_helper.rb

def obfuscate_emails(content, domain_prefix = 'nirvana', clss = 'maildecode')
  # This shall protect emails from spam spiders/crawlers gathering emails from webpages
  # Add the following SASS to your Stylesheets
  #
  # span.maildecode
  #   direction: rtl
  #   unicode-bidi: bidi-override
  #
  # Further more you might want to use Javascript(.erb) to add links to the email addresses like this
  #
  # $(document).ready(function() {
  #   function link_emails(subdomain){
  #     console.log("Find an replace reverse emails, fake subdomain is "+subdomain);
  #     $(".maildecode").each(function() {
  #       email = $(this).text().replace('.'+subdomain,'').split("").reverse().join("");
  #       console.log("- clean email is "+email);
  #       // $(this).html($(this).text().replace('.'+subdomain,'')); // uncomment if you like to clean up the html a bit
  #       $(this).wrap('<a href="mailto:'+email+'">');
  #     });
  #   }
  #
  #   link_emails('<%= ENV['OBFUSCATE_EMAIL_SUBDOMAIN'] %>');
  # });
  #
  # Thanks to
  # http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-mail-addresses-compared/

  email_re = /[\w.!#\$%+-]+@[\w-]+(?:\.[\w-]+)+/
  content.scan(email_re).each do |mail|
    obfuscate_mail = "<span class='#{clss}'>#{mail.reverse.split('@')[0]}<span style='display: none;'>.#{domain_prefix}</span>@#{mail.reverse.split('@')[1]}</span>"
    content = content.sub(mail, obfuscate_mail)
  end
  content # use raw(obfuscate_emails(content)) otherwise rails will escape the html
end

Answer 1

Just use the built in mail_to helper that Rails has...

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/UrlHelper.html#method-i-mail_to

mail_to 'email@here.com', 'click to email', :encode => .... # couple of encoding options

NOTE: This does not work in Rails 4 anymore. From the docs: Prior to Rails 4.0, mail_to provided options for encoding the address in order to hinder email harvesters. To take advantage of these options, install the actionview-encoded_mail_to gem. (Thanks to @zwippie)

Answer 2

You could simply replace the @-sign as a simple solution:

"example@example.com".sub("@","-at-") #=> example-at-example.com
"example@example.org".sub("@","{at}") #=> example{at}example.org

see obfuscate emails with ruby to protect against harvesters