Here's a quick little jQuery script I created just now. Don't give your email address to spam bots! Instead, try this.
Markup:
1<a href="/contact"><span class="no-script">Contact Us</span><span class="obfuscate">com/mydomain//me</span></a>
(Use your email address in the format above, where your original address is me@mydomain.com) CSS:
1span.obfuscate{
2 display: none;
3}
2 display: none;
3}
Javascript (jQuery):
1// email obfuscator
2var $obfuscate = function(el){
3 var obStr = $(el).text();
4 var prefix = obStr.split("//")[1];
5 var suffix = obStr.split("//")[0];
6 var domain = suffix.split("/")[1];
7 var ext = suffix.split("/")[0];
8 var returnStr = prefix + '@' + domain + '.' + ext;
9 // console.log(returnStr);
10 $(el).text(returnStr).show(100);
11
12}
13
14$('span.obfuscate').each(function(){
15 $(this).siblings('.no-script').hide();
16 $obfuscate(this);
17});
2var $obfuscate = function(el){
3 var obStr = $(el).text();
4 var prefix = obStr.split("//")[1];
5 var suffix = obStr.split("//")[0];
6 var domain = suffix.split("/")[1];
7 var ext = suffix.split("/")[0];
8 var returnStr = prefix + '@' + domain + '.' + ext;
9 // console.log(returnStr);
10 $(el).text(returnStr).show(100);
11
12}
13
14$('span.obfuscate').each(function(){
15 $(this).siblings('.no-script').hide();
16 $obfuscate(this);
17});
This example uses a link to the /contact/ page of a website, and does not open an email address. If you wanted to use a mailto link you could adapt the script slightly to also handle the 'href' value of the link's parent like so:
1$(el).text(returnStr).show(100).parents('a').attr('href','mailto:' + returnStr);
I don't think bots will grab com/domain//me and add it to a junk mail list, but they'll certainly harvest an email in plain text, or in the href of a "mailto" link. The idea is that, since the bots don't view the text rendered via javascript, they don't see the actual address, just the obfuscated version, when crawling through the source code.
I didn't want to create extra linkbait. Here's a method I wrote that uses jQuery. I choose to use empty ahrefs w/special data parameters.
http://bit.ly/1be6nns
The format looks like this and nothing is displayed on the webpage if JS is not enabled:
[a href="" data-u="username" data-d="domain.com"][/a]
NOTE: I also wrote a ColdFusion UDF to auto-generate the mailto links and have used jSoup to convert existing email addresses within an HTML page fragment (CMS) to this format on-the-fly.