How to Protect Emails from Spammers with Email Encoder in 2023

As a WordPress expert with over 10 years of experience securing sites, I often get asked how to display email addresses without being targeted by spam bots. Email harvesting bots are a real threat – over 90% of inboxes get spam daily according to a Radicati Group study. The good news is email encoders make it simple to show addresses to real visitors but hide them from bots. In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll show you exactly why and how to leverage encoding for WordPress email protection.

Spam Bot Threats: By the Numbers

To understand why email encoding is so critical, let‘s look at some key spam statistics:

• 306.4 billion spam emails sent globally per day (Radicati Group)
• Spam accounts for 65% of all global email traffic (Proofpoint)
• Top spam categories include:
  • Phishing scams: 26%
  • Malware spreaders: 21%
  • Adult content spam: 16% (Symantec)
• Financial impact of spam will reach $14.5 billion by 2027 (Juniper)

As you can see, spam, phishing, and malware pose a tremendous threat, making email protection essential.

How Email Harvesting Bots Work

The majority of spam originates from email harvesting bots that scrape addresses from websites, social networks, forums, and more. They extract any email addresses found in pages, posts, or user profiles.

These bots can harvest shocklingly high numbers of addresses:

• The largest bot network spans 35 million infected devices (Cyren)
• A single bot can extract over 200,000 emails per day (Incapsula)

The harvested addresses get sold to spam networks and cybercriminals who leverage them for spreading spam, phishing campaigns, denial of service attacks, password brute forcing, and stealing financial data.

Protect Emails with Encoder Plugins

Email encoders serve as the first line of defense by hiding addresses from harvesting bots. They work by:

1. Scanning website content for plain text email addresses.
2. Encoding addresses using methods like HTML entities, hexadecimal, ROT13, or CSS techniques.
3. Storing the encoded address in the site‘s front-end code.

For example, the email [email protected] may encode as john@example.com in the page source.

This scrambled address prevents bots from recognizing and collecting the email, but displays a normal clickable mailto link for human visitors.

Popular WordPress Email Encoder Plugins

Based on having tested top encoding plugins over the years, I recommend either:

• Email Address Encoder (free limited version + paid premium)
• WP Email Encoder (paid)

Both automatically encode emails across all site content including posts, pages, widgets, forms, and more.

Some key differences:

Overall both are excellent choices depending on your budget and site needs.

Step-by-Step: Encoding Emails in WordPress

Protecting your email only takes a few minutes:

1. Install your chosen plugin – Either Email Address Encoder or WP Email Encoder.
2. Activate the plugin in your WP dashboard.
3. Continue adding email links to content normally. The plugin will now automatically encode them.
4. Validate encoded addresses by viewing page source code.
5. Tweak advanced settings like encoding method if desired (paid plugins).

And that‘s it! Now your emails will display properly to visitors but scramble from spam bots.

Combining Encoders with Other Security Layers

While encoders provide the first critical protection layer, I always recommend pairing them with other measures like:

✔️ Web application firewalls (Wordfence)
✔️ reCAPTCHA on forms
✔️ Secure login pages and admin areas
✔️ Ongoing plugin updates

Layering multiple defenses ensures maximum email and site security over the long run.

I hope this guide gave you a detailed look at why email encoders are vital for every WordPress site and how to properly implement encoding yourself. Please reach out if you have any other questions!