Will redirecting to a mailto URL prevent spam bots from harvesting the email address?

Question

On https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/15-ways-to-hide-your-email-address/, under the sub heading Replacing with a PHP script, a method to hide email addresses is presented that I like very much. On the user page in question one includes

<p>Please <a href="mailhandler.php">email us</a>.</p>

And mailhandler.php looks like this:

<?php
    header ("Location: mailto:[email protected]");
    exit();
?>

If the user clicks the 'email us' link, the computer responds with opening a New Mail window from its mail program, with the address filled in.

But is this method foolproof? This rationale makes me wonder: a bot visits every link it comes accross. In the case of the 'email us' link, it ultimately gets the command to open a New Mail window, which a normal browser passes on to the mail program. So, the only thing a spam bot would have to do is analyze that command correctly, and it has found another email address.

Answer 1

No method of obfuscation is fool proof. But the value of getting an email address for sending spam may not be worth the effort to the bots. The more noval or proprietary the method of obfuscation the less it becomes economical to harvest the emails. To un-obfuscate they need to re-write their harvester program.

In the case above, it looks like, (on the HTML page), a web based email. But then redirects to a email link. One could read the header of the mailhandler.php to see the email address, but if less than 1% of sites are using that method it would likely not be worth re-writing their harvester.

If 50% of sites are using that method, then it would no longer be effective.