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."
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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