Plaintext Emails Test

Email addresses written in plain text on a public web page are a magnet for spam-harvesting bots, which crawl the open web looking for addresses to add to bulk mailing lists. Once an address lands on a spam list there is no practical way to remove it, so the only protection is keeping addresses off public pages in plaintext form. This test scans your page for plaintext email addresses so you can replace them with contact forms or obfuscated equivalents that defeat simple scrapers.

Why plaintext emails still matter

Email harvesting bots are remarkably effective at scraping plaintext addresses from public web pages, and once an address lands on a spam list there is no practical way to remove it. The only protection is to keep the address off public pages in plaintext form. Several techniques make the address invisible or unusable to simple scrapers while keeping it functional for legitimate users.

The cleanest modern approach is to replace direct email addresses with contact forms, which solve the problem entirely while also adding spam filtering and analytics. When a visible address is genuinely needed (for example, for press contacts or accessibility reasons), HTML entity encoding, JavaScript-built mailto links, or platform-level email obfuscation features all defeat the simplest scrapers, though sophisticated ones decode them.

Effective obfuscation techniques

• Contact forms as the default, since they sidestep the problem entirely.
• HTML entity encoding: writing the address as co... defeats simple scrapers.
• JavaScript-built mailto links assembled client-side from separate parts, which scrapers that read static HTML cannot follow.
• CDN-level email obfuscation available in some CDN platforms (notably Cloudflare).

This test reports plaintext email addresses found on your page. The fix guide below covers contact form alternatives, common obfuscation patterns, and the trade-offs between accessibility and spam protection for visible addresses.