Brandon Wang

Using <bdo> to Hide Your Email Address

There are many ways to hide your email address, ranging from using Flash to hex to linking to address-hiding websites, and even using stuff like “somebody at somebody dot com”

Unfortunately, the “somebody at somebody dot com” is the most common model, and the spammers have even figured out how to write scripts that read that.

What we need is a new way to hide email addresses.

Enter <bdo>.

Note: I don’t claim that I came up with this solution, but I haven’t seen any website mention this so far in my web trawls.

Basically, <bdo> stands for Bidirectional Override. For those of you that don’t know what that means, basically it allows you to switch the text order on the fly.

Cool, huh?

So if I typed…

<bdo dir=”rtl”>Hello there!</bdo>

The result would be:

!ereht olleH

While the usefulness of this might be limited, it seems a lot of spammers haven’t used this option yet. Give it a try.

If your email were “somebody @ somebody.com” (my favorite example), just enclose it in the <bdo>. So our example would be…

<bdo dir=”rtl”>moc.ydobemos @ ydobemos</bdo>

(Note that you have to type your email address backwards, because a backward backward is a forward!)

And we all know what you get.

I recommend using this method with other techniques like using “at” instead of “@”, but if it does work out, let me know. Thanks.

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