Email cloaking within the Web Calendar software

Web Calendar Plus can automatically cloak your email addresses thus hiding them from spam robots.

Why is this important? There are spam robots that systematically cull the internet for mailing addresses that are displayed on websites. It is very easy to write a spam robot by simply looking for the text "mailto" within a website and then storing the email address. Sophisticated spam robots will also try to apply context to the email address to put you on a list for spam that is somewhat related to the content of your website. For example if you have website dealing with real estate, spam robots can associate your email address in the real estate category and thus send you real estate oriented junk mail. Junk email senders will purchase lists of email addresses related to real estate and chances are your email address will appear on that list.

How does Web Cal Plus cloak your email addresses? It simply creates Javascript code that fools the spam robots. The spam robots never see the keyword "mailto" within the html text therefore your email address will not get published or sold. The cool thing is that the website still behaves normally in that your users can still click on your email link and send you email. It's only the spam robots that are fooled.

For example check out the following email address link. If you click on View Source within your browser you will see a bunch of codes where the MAILTO is supposed to be.  It's addressed to someone at somewhere.com. The codes look something like the following:   someon

You may click on the following link as it will bring up your email program with the addressee of someone@somewhere.com

someone@somewhere.com

These codes will confuse the spam robots but will enable your users to functionally click the mailing address link.

How do you setup Web Calendar Plus to take advantage of this feature?  There are two places - in the Settings, Calendar Settings, Admin Tab you'll see a prompt to cloak the webmaster's name on the bottom of each webpage. Click that option.

The second place is on the Settings, Calendar Settings, Generation Tab where you'll see the prompt to use cloaking technology for imbedded mailto email addresses.  Make sure that one is also checked.  So when you type in a new event, in the notes section type in mailto:joe@schmoe.com and it will appear underlined and in the color blue.  When you generate your calendar pages it will be cloaked using Javascript.