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Email Address Obfuscation

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Email Address Obfuscation

Last updated Apr 16, 2026|Copy as Markdown|View as Markdown|Agent setup

OverviewBackgroundHow it worksChange Email Address Obfuscation settingPrevent Cloudflare from obfuscating emailTroubleshoot email obfuscation

By enabling Cloudflare Email Address Obfuscation, email addresses on your web page will be hidden from bots, while keeping them visible to humans. In fact, there are no visible changes to your website for visitors.

Background

Email harvesters and other bots roam the Internet looking for email addresses to add to lists that target recipients for spam. This trend results in an increasing amount of unwanted email.

Web administrators have come up with clever ways to protect against this by writing out email addresses, such as help [at] cloudflare [dot] com or by using embedded images of the email address. However, you lose the convenience of clicking on the email address to automatically send an email. By enabling Cloudflare Email Address Obfuscation, email addresses on your web page will be obfuscated (hidden) from bots, while keeping them visible to humans. In fact, there are no visible changes to your website for visitors.

How it works

When Email Address Obfuscation is enabled, Cloudflare replaces visible email addresses in your HTML with links like [email protected]. If a visitor sees this obfuscated format, they can click the link to reveal the actual email address. This approach prevents bots from scraping email addresses while keeping them accessible to real users.

Cloudflare injects a small decode script (email-decode.min.js) into the page using the defer attribute. This means the script does not block page rendering. It downloads in parallel with HTML parsing and executes after the document is fully parsed. If you have custom JavaScript that interacts with obfuscated email elements, note that the decode script runs before the DOMContentLoaded event.

Change Email Address Obfuscation setting

Cloudflare enables email address obfuscation automatically when you sign up.

To disable Email Address Obfuscation in the dashboard:

In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to the Security Settings page.
Go to Settings ↗

(Optional) Filter by Client-side abuse.

For Email Address Obfuscation, switch the toggle to Off.

To disable Email Address Obfuscation in the dashboard:

In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to the Scrape Shield page.
Go to Scrape Shield ↗

For Email Address Obfuscation, switch the toggle to Off.

To disable Email Address Obfuscation with the API, send a PATCH request with email_obfuscation as the setting name in the URI path, and the value parameter set to "off".

Note

To use this feature on specific hostnames - instead of across your entire zone - use a configuration rule.

Prevent Cloudflare from obfuscating email

To prevent Cloudflare from obfuscating specific email addresses, you can:

Add the following comment in the page HTML code:
contact@example.com

Return email addresses in JSON format for AJAX calls, making sure your web server returns a content type of application/json.

Disable the Email Obfuscation feature by creating a configuration rule to be applied on a specific endpoint.

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Troubleshoot email obfuscation

To prevent unexpected website behavior, email addresses are not obfuscated when they appear in:

Any HTML tag attribute, except for the href attribute of the a tag.

Other HTML tags:
<script></script>

<noscript></noscript>

<textarea></textarea>

<xmp></xmp>

<head></head>

Any page that does not have a MIME type of text/html or application/xhtml+xml.

Notes

Email Obfuscation will not apply in the following cases:
You are using the Cache-Control: no-transform header.

The HTML/JavaScript code is specifically added by a Worker.

Email Obfuscation might not work as expected when the HTML page includes <template></template> tags.

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Overview

Background

How it works

Change Email Address Obfuscation setting

Prevent Cloudflare from obfuscating email

Troubleshoot email obfuscation

Edit pageReport issue

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