How to Prevent Dumb Crawlers from Scraping Your Email Address

If you’ve ever embedded your email address in a website using a mailto: link, you’ve probably received spam. Why? Because simple bots crawl websites looking for @domain.com or mailto: patterns to harvest for junk.


Luckily, there are effective ways to protect your email address from dumb crawlers while still making it usable for real visitors. Here's how.


Alt text

❌ Why mailto: in plain HTML is bad


<a href="mailto:you@example.com">Email me</a>

This is easy for humans and bots to read. Dumb scrapers look for:



Once they find it, your inbox becomes a spam magnet.



🧠 What are “dumb” crawlers?


"Dumb" crawlers:



They're fast, cheap, and widely used by spammers.



✅ Obfuscation Strategies That Work


1. Use HTML Entity Encoding


Instead of writing your email directly, encode each character:


<a href="mailto:&#121;&#111;&#117;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#97;&#109;&#112;&#108;&#101;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;">
  Email me
</a>

This is still functional in the browser, but harder for dumb bots to read.



2. Set the href Dynamically with JavaScript


Here’s a basic approach:


<a id="email-link">Email me</a>

<script>
  const user = 'me' const domain = 'rossyanez.com' const link =
  document.getElementById('email-link') link.href = `mailto:${user}@${domain}`
</script>

Bots won't see the email since they don’t run JS.



3. Use a Custom React Hook (for Next.js / React projects)


// useEmailLink.ts
import { useEffect } from 'react'

export function useEmailLink(linkId = 'email-link') {
  useEffect(() => {
    const email = 'me@rossyanez.com'
    const mailto = `mailto:${email}`
    const link = document.getElementById(linkId) as HTMLAnchorElement | null
    if (link) link.href = mailto
  }, [linkId])
}

Use this inside a component:



export default function SafeEmailLink({ linkId = 'email-link' }) {
  useEmailLink(linkId)

return (

<a id={linkId} className="text-sm text-blue-500 hover:underline">
  Email me
</a>
) }


✅ Bonus: Combine Techniques for Maximum Safety


You can encode the email in HTML as a fallback, then override it with JavaScript:


<a
  id="email-link"
  href="mailto:&#121;&#111;&#117;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#97;&#109;&#112;&#108;&#101;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;">
  Email me
</a>

This way:




❌ What Doesn’t Help Much




🛡️ TL;DR — Best Practice