Email Address Munger/Email Address Encoder

What is email address munging?

Email address munging is the act of using ASCII, JavaScript, and scrambling of letters in your email address in order to hide your email address from spam bots, spiders, and spoofers.

Our anti junk email tool protects your email address and helps prevent spam by avoiding spam bots and email address harvesters.

This tool allows you to munge and mask your email address by using ASCII, JavaScript, and/or image links.

Any useful site needs to have contact information posted, and this has to include an email address. Encoding your email address when you post it on the web is essential if you want to stop spam bots and spiders from continuing to find your email address information and sending it bulk email. A large research study by the Center for Democracy and Technology shows that munging your email address the way we do helps strongly, successfully, and efficiently to avoid junk mail.

You can call it "mung", "munge", "encode", "obfuscate", "mask", "hide", "cloak", or "conceal". Most website owners don't bother to implement any of this, but definitely should. Anyone with an inbox full of spam will tell you that it's essential.

Thanks for visiting us, and thanks for making us one of the most popular and most trusted anti spam and spam prevention sites on the web.

Instructions:

1. • If you want your link to display your email address (instead of something like "contact us") click on the "Plain Email Link" button to the left. The link will look like your@email.address.
   • If you want your link to say something like "email me" or "contact us", click on the "Customized Display" button to the left. The link will look like your customized link.
   • If you want to display an image email link, click on the "Image Link" button to the left, and enter your email address and image URL.

2. Check the "Add descriptive comment tag" box if you would like to add an invisible comment tag to your link. We advise using these so that you can remember what a link says one year from now.

   NOTE: If you use the descriptive tags, you can modify them as you wish.

3. Check the "Munge text but do not create link" box if you don't want your email address to be clickable. Use this option also if you want to munge something other than an email address.

4. Check the "Show me what my link looks like" box if you want a window to come up comparing what the link looks like to you versus what the link may like to a spam bot.

5. If you want to add Advanced Options to the link like a cc:, bcc:, title, or pre-written body, read the Mailto Syntax Tutorial to work with the "Advanced Options" input box. Otherwise, leave it blank as it is an unnecessary step.

6. Choose either the ASCII Munge or JavaScript Munge options. Either option will protect your email address well, but the JavaScript option is considered better.

   For advanced users: If you choose the JavaScript Munge option is chosen, instead of copying everything in this first text area and pasting it to the top of your page, you can create a separate JavaScript file paste the code there. Most spam bots and spiders will never download a JavaScript file, further making your email address even more protected.

7. Click on the button to munge your link, and follow the instructions above the two text boxes.

8. To munge another link, just repeat the procedure.

AddressMunger.com