A lightweight plugin that protects email addresses from email-harvesting robots, by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.
| Last updated | April 12, 2026Updated in the last year |
|---|---|
| Tested up to | WordPress 7.0.8Older than WordPress 7.1.4, the current release |
| Needs WordPress | 2.0 or newer |
| Needs PHP | 5.3 or newer |
| First published | November 21, 2011 |
| Support, last two months | 1 of 2 threads resolved (50%) |
4.2 / 5 from 160 reviews
| 5 stars | 119 |
|---|---|
| 4 stars | 6 |
| 3 stars | 3 |
| 2 stars | 6 |
| 1 star | 26 |
A lightweight plugin that protects plain email addresses and mailto links from email-harvesting robots, by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities. Has an effect on the posts, pages, comments, excerpts, text widgets and other filtered content. Works without JavaScript — just simple spam protection.
To see whether all your email addresses are properly protected, use the free page scanner tool.
Other content (like phone numbers) can be protected using [encode] shortcode:
[encode]+1 (555) 123-4567[/encode] [encode link="tel:+15551234567"]+1 (555) 123-4567[/encode]
Premium Features
Check out the Premium version of Email Address Encoder.
The opening of the plugin's own description. The full text, installation notes and changelog are on its WordPress.org page.
This plugin searches for email addresses using WordPress filters like the_content, widget_text and others. Found email addresses are encoded using decimal and hexadecimal HTML entities, which obfuscates the email addresses to protect it from being read by most email-harvesting robots.
Alternatively, you can use the [encode] shortcode: [encode]+1 (555) 123-4567[/encode]
You can use the “Page Scanner” found under Settings -> Email Encoder to see whether all your email addresses are protected. Alternatively, you can manually look at the “page source” of your site.
Please note: Chrome’s Developer Tools, Safari’s Web Inspector and others automatically decode decimal and hexadecimal entities. You need to look at the “plain HTML source code”.
This guide will help you encode all email addresses that aren’t caught.
![[Premium] Hardened protection: A preview of JavaScript and CSS based techniques](https://ps.w.org/email-address-encoder/assets/screenshot-3.png?rev=1981695)
![[Premium] Phone number protection using polymorphous ROT47/CSS](https://ps.w.org/email-address-encoder/assets/screenshot-4.png?rev=2066777)
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Read from the WordPress.org plugin API on , when WordPress 7.1.4 was the current release. WordPress.org rounds active installs into buckets. These are the directory's figures, not my verdict, and I haven't tested this plugin. The author takes donations at their donate page.
