Mailto is a class written by Debugged Interactive Designs in PHP4 to obfuscate e-mail addresses from spam harvesters. The class lets you easily encode an entire anchor tag using ROT13 Encryption. At run-time, javascript is used to decode the ROT13 encryption. If javascript is disabled, then the e-mail address is safely shown by reversing the e-mail address using PHP and re-reversing (versing?) it at run-time using CSS.
Silvan Mühlemann wrote the article Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared, where he uses 9 different e-mail addresses over a 1.5 year period. On this page he published the e-mail addresses using 9 different techniques. It turns out using ROT13 encoding (see our Mailto CakePHP helper) was one of the 3 techniques that "...are absolutely rock-solid and keep your addresses safe from the harvesters."
We wrote and submitted 2 articles (1 and 2) to cakephp.org's bakery and they were both published. One is the tutorial Captcha Component with Securimage, which explains how to integrate the Securimage class with CakePHP. The other is the tutorial Bake ROT13 Encoded "mailto:" Links, which explains how to write a CakePHP helper to fool spambots...
Mailto is a free, open source CakePHP Helper class, written by Debugged Interactive Designs, to provide a solution to spambots collecting e-mail addresses from websites. It encrypts the anchor tag (with PHP) using ROT13 encoding, and is decoded (with Javascript) at run-time. The ROT13 encoding simply shifts every letter by 13 places in the alphabet while leaving non-alpha characters untouched... |
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