Can spam bots fire mouseenter or hover events?

Question

I am trying to add my email address to my homepage so that spam bots cannot see it. Somewhere in stackoverflow, I found a solution to write a return address:

<span class="reverse"> moc.liam@esrever </span> <style> .reverse { direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: bidi-override; } </style> 

But so that users can still interact with mailto-link, I have the following code:

 <a href=" moc.liam@esrever :otliam" class="reverse"><i class="icon-envelope"></i></a> <script> $('body').on('mouseenter', '.reverse', function() { $(this).attr('href', $(this).attr('href').split('').reverse().join('')); }); $('body').on('mouseleave', '.reverse', function() { $(this).attr('href', $(this).attr('href').split('').reverse().join('')); }); </script> 

Is this a safe way to hide your email address from spam bots or trigger a mouseenter event?

Answer 1

A “general” spambot that triggered events to collect email addresses would have to push the page into a mostly dumb browser, somehow determine what might be JS-confused email content, and then blindly try to mimic user interactions that defocus interesting data.

This is a huge job that may not be of any use, and the spammer will never think about it.

What would they do if they were really interested in collecting your site, it turns out how your protection works (hey, it's just written in the opposite order), and only in a special case, a spambot to unwind data manually.

This type of protection scheme should be more than enough if you are too small to be targeted, but the disadvantage is that visitors to the site who do not use JavaScript will be difficult.

Answer 2

Spam bots, in general, will only read the page layout and look for links by email or email addresses that match a specific template. Thus, your method is likely to drop most of them - those that will (incorrectly) see moc.liam@esrever as an email address.

However, just as the scanner knows that the email link starts with mailto: it can also know that the email back link ends with :otliam . If the creator of the crawler finds a proposal to cancel the email address, just like you, it simply modifies the bot to process return addresses.

The best protection is good email spam detection or an HTML form that uses Captcha or similar.