All websites present their contents to your web browser in a format known as hyper text mark-up language or HTML for short. The website may be written in pure HTML or perhaps assisted through a scripting language such as PHP or JavaScript that produces html text. Ultimately the scripting language does not matter, as your client browser displays what the HTML says it should.
In a nutshell YES - when you place an email on a web site, if you want it to be "click-able" so it seamlessly opens your favourite email tool, the email must be presented in a very structured format i.e. set way within the HTML.
The email address is presented in the HTML like this:
<a> href="mailto:youremail@anydomain.com">DISPLAY TEXT</a>
Where youremail@anydomain.com is an example email address and DISPLAY TEXT is whatever text you wish to display.
This format is either written directly onto the HTML by your web site author or it gets presented like this by a script.
The above example would appear like this: DISPLAY TEXT
As the standard email address is very structured and always looks the same, this is particularly of use to software scrapers. Knowing the structure they can easily harvest the email information from your web-site, see WHAT IS A WEBSITE SCRAPER ?.
Our service prevents scraping because your email address is no longer contained within the html code structure (or any other code such as Java Script) on
your site.
Instead we hold the address on our server (once you have registered it) and release it only once we are sure a bona-fide visitor is accessing it.
Enjoy !
Get an Email Address Encryption key for the WEBEMAILPROTECTOR service and secure your website email addresses here GET-A-KEY page.
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