CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyemail-spam
Lauraponi
Lauraponi

Reputation: 319

How to protect visible email address from spam with gem for Ruby 4?

I'd like to obfuscate an email address on my webpage. I'm hoping to avoid JS in case my users deactivate it.

I found this gem: actionview-encoded_mail_to but it doesn't seem to work for me. It shows the full email address on the page (which is good), but it also shows it in the console.

I tried the 3 examples with the same result. The gem appears in my Gemfile so should be correctly installed.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 771

Answers (1)

DiegoSalazar
DiegoSalazar

Reputation: 13531

You can always roll your own but, first, that gem definitely works. Here's what I did...

Using the Gem

I added the gem to a Rails 4.2 app:

# Gemfile
gem 'actionview-encoded_mail_to'

I installed it:

$ bundle install

I entered the console:

$ rails console

I made the helper methods available in the console:

include ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper

Called the mail_to helper with the same arguments as the example:

mail_to "[email protected]", nil, replace_at: "_at_", replace_dot: "_dot_", class: "email"

...and got this result:

"<a class=\"email\" href=\"mailto:[email protected]\">me_at_domain_dot_com</a>"

That "me_at_domain_dot_com" looks properly obfuscated. What steps did you take?

Rolling your own obfuscation

It would be a trivial string substitution to obfuscate an email string, we can just use sub:

def obfuscate_email(email, replace_at: '_at_', replace_dot: '_dot_')
  email.sub("@", replace_at).sub ".", replace_dot
end

I tested that out in the console:

obfuscate_email "[email protected]"
# => "me_at_example_dot_com"

You can place that method in application_helper.rb and use it in any of your views:

link_to obfuscate_email(user.email), "mailto:#{user.email}"
# => "<a href=\"mailto:[email protected]\">me_at_example_dot_com</a>"

Note that the href must be the unobfuscated email in order for it to work properly.

Towards a more complete mail_to helper

def obfuscated_mail_to(email, options = {})
  link_to obfuscate_email(email), "mail_to:#{email}", options
end

Testing that in the console:

obfuscated_mail_to "[email protected]", class: "email"
=> "<a class=\"email\" href=\"mail_to:[email protected]\">me_at_example_dot_com</a>"

Hope that helps!

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions