RobArt Email Guard

Description

Publish an email address on a web page and spam bots will find it. They crawl pages looking for anything that looks like an address, add it to their lists, and the spam follows. The usual answers are bad: an image of your address can’t be clicked or copied, a contact form hides the address but adds friction, and writing “name [at] example [dot] com” looks unprofessional and still doesn’t stop a determined scraper.

RobArt Email Guard hides your email addresses from automated harvesters while keeping them a normal, clickable link for the people you actually want to reach.

There is no such thing as a method that defeats every scraper — a bot that runs a full browser and executes all the JavaScript can, in principle, see anything a human can. But the vast majority of harvesting is done by simple crawlers that read the raw HTML. Email Guard defeats those completely, and offers a stronger method that stops all but the most targeted, resource-heavy bots.

How it protects an email

Email Guard offers three methods, from simple to strongest. You pick a site-wide default and can override it per email.

• HTML entity encoding — the address and its mailto: link are written as HTML character entities: a wall of numbers in the page source that means nothing to a crawler, but which the browser turns back into a normal clickable link for the visitor. No JavaScript required.
• JavaScript hydration — the page source contains no email address at all, not even encoded. A tiny script rebuilds the clickable link in the browser after the page loads, so a crawler that only reads raw HTML finds nothing to harvest.
• Click to reveal (Pro) — the strongest option: the page contains only an opaque token and a small “Reveal email” button. The address is fetched from your server only after a real visitor clicks. Automated harvesters don’t click, so they never trigger it.

Ways to use it

• Shortcode — [raeg_secure_email address="[email protected]"] anywhere shortcodes run. Add text="Email us" for custom link text, or method="encode" / "js" / "reveal" to override the site default for that one email.
• Automatic protection — switch on auto-scan and Email Guard finds and protects every email address and mailto: link in your posts and pages automatically, with no shortcode needed.
• Protected Emails page — a built-in report lists every email found in your content, where it appears, and whether it is protected, with a one-click re-scan.

Styling

Protected links can inherit your theme’s link styles, or you can style them from the settings page — link colour, hover colour, underline (solid, dotted, or dashed) and bold — with no CSS required. Every protected link also carries a raeg-email CSS class for theme-level styling.

Free vs Pro

The free plugin includes HTML entity encoding, JavaScript hydration, the shortcode, automatic scanning, the Protected Emails report, and the styling controls. Pro adds the Click-to-Reveal method with its own appearance options (inline link or compact pill) and custom button text.

Uninstall

When you delete RobArt Email Guard from the Plugins screen, its settings and stored options are removed from the database. Your content is never modified — the plugin protects emails at display time, so deleting it simply returns your pages to showing addresses normally. No custom tables are left behind.

External Services

RobArt Email Guard does not send any data to external services during normal operation. All email protection happens on your own site.

The Click-to-Reveal feature (Pro) makes a request to your own site’s built-in WordPress endpoint (admin-ajax) when a visitor clicks to reveal an address — this stays entirely within your own server and involves no third party.

If you activate a Pro licence, licence validation and update delivery contact the RobArt licence server at robsnow.eu; this happens only for Pro licence holders and only when checking a licence or fetching a Pro update.

Technical details