This morning I got an e-mail from a client that people couldn’t send an e-mail from his website. I took a look from my phone, and sure enough, instead of seeing his e-mail address on the contact page I saw the words “e-mail protected” as a link.
When I tapped on the link, a screen popped up telling me I needed to download and install a Cloudflare decoder to see the email address. This is what customers were seeing!
I was able to log in to his Cloudflare account, and disable this “Email Obfuscation” but then I got curious. Could this be happening to more clients?
I went through some other client sites looking for “clickable” email addresses, and sure enough, it was happening on them too. In one case, the email address finally appeared after a few seconds, but in two others it just stuck, never clearing, and never allowing me to proceed with a click.
Could it be a caching issue? I suppose that’s quite possible, so I went through those sites and excluded the contact pages from caching, but the problem did not seem to go away.
Check Your Website!
If you have your email address showing on your site, do yourself a favor and go check right now. Honestly, to minimize spam, it’s generally a good idea to obfuscate email addressed on a webpage, but at the risk of losing inquiries, I’ve just turned it off. I did it for a lot of sites, and here’s how I did it in Cloudflare, where “Email Obfuscation” is turned on by default .
