Mail encryption plugins don't obfuscate the mail address

[Christian Kramer]

In organizer editor the plugin ‘obfuscate email’ is recommended for protecting against mail grabber. But this plugin doesn’t work. Another plugin (CryptX), which I use in other installations, doesn’t work, too. So I guess, it is a bug in TEC.

I tested it on two pages, the event page and the organizer page. The result:
– On the event page the mail address is only text. (In my opinion it should be linked by default, independed from the protection plugin)
– On organizers page the mail address is visible as a link, but is unprotected although the protection plugins are activated.

[Barry]

Hi!

It’s certainly possible to tweak the output and, for instance, obfuscate email addresses. Our Themer’s Guide covers the basics of overriding and customizing our templates – but we’d need to leave you to figure out how best to handle the obfuscation process.

In organizer editor the plugin ‘obfuscate email’ is recommended for protecting against mail grabber.

We link to a list of plugins tagged with obfuscate in the WordPress plugin directory – but we’re not really making any specific recommendations, there – that’s primarily aimed at helping you, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee there’s going to be a plugin that “just works” in this situation.

Sorry for any confusion on that front … but does that help or at least clarify things?

[Christian Kramer]

Hi Barry,

thanks for regarding to themer’s guide. But this doesn’t help.

Normally any obfuscating plugin detects mail addresses automatically – without tweaking any core file. But TEC doesn’t support it.
Maybe it depends on the <?php echo $email ?>, but I don’t think so.

Any idea?

[Barry]

Normally any obfuscating plugin detects mail addresses automatically – without tweaking any core file. But TEC doesn’t support it.

The question to ask there is, how do they detect it?

When a post is displayed – whether a regular WordPress post or page or else a custom post type like events – we ordinarily expect the post content can be scanned and modified by other plugins (usingWordPress’s filter system). So it’s possible the obfuscating plugins you are referring to hinge on that process.

In this case, the email addresses are not within the post content – so that could explain why they aren’t being detected automatically.

If you were to set up a theme override, though (by following the steps in our Themer’s Guide) you could adapt bits of code like:

<?php echo $email ?>

Changing them to:

<?php echo my_email_obfuscator( $email ) ?>

Where my_email_obfuscator() is either your own custom function (which you would have to write) or even a suitable existing function from your obfuscation library/plugin of choice.

I hope that gives you some ideas – but since there’s not too much more we can do here I’ll go ahead and close the thread.

Thanks!

[Author]

Posts