Title: Email hyperlink within Table
Last modified: August 20, 2016

---

# Email hyperlink within Table

 *  Resolved [tonythomasuk@btinternet.com](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tonythomasukbtinternetcom/)
 * (@tonythomasukbtinternetcom)
 * [13 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-hyperlink-within-table/)
 * Hello
    I have tables containing peoples Email addresses. How can I give this 
   data an hyperlink so that reader can press and go straight to email editor such
   as Outlook Thank you Tony Thomas [http://www.croquetnw.co.uk](http://www.croquetnw.co.uk)
 * [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tablepress/](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tablepress/)

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  Plugin Author [Tobias Bäthge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tobiasbg/)
 * (@tobiasbg)
 * [13 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-hyperlink-within-table/#post-3396202)
 * Hi Thomas,
 * thanks for your post.
 * Please take a look at the TablePress Automatic Link conversion Extension at [http://tablepress.org/extensions/automatic-url-conversion/](http://tablepress.org/extensions/automatic-url-conversion/)
   
   This can automatically make URLs and email addresses clickable.
 * Regards,
    Tobias
 *  Thread Starter [tonythomasuk@btinternet.com](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tonythomasukbtinternetcom/)
 * (@tonythomasukbtinternetcom)
 * [13 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-hyperlink-within-table/#post-3396292)
 * Thank you Tobias, that worked really well.
    Now I wish to take it further – to
   prevent spam fishing, I would like to replace the ‘@’ in urls by ‘#’, but still
   retain the hyperlink. Is this possible? Thank you Tony Thomas [http://www.croquetnw.co.uk](http://www.croquetnw.co.uk)
 *  Plugin Author [Tobias Bäthge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tobiasbg/)
 * (@tobiasbg)
 * [13 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-hyperlink-within-table/#post-3396316)
 * Hi,
 * great to hear that this worked.
 * Unfortunately, I have to disappoint you here. The internal function (coming from
   WordPress) that the TablePress Extension uses for this, requires the @ character
   in the address, as that’s how it determines if something is an email address.
 * However, even changing that and retaining the hyperlink wouldn’t work: In order
   for the hyperlink to work, it would need the correct address as well. And then,
   the address would also be in the source code of the page (once in correct form,
   and once in “mangled” form). So, a spam bot would still be able to recognize 
   it.
 * In order to securely (to some extent), you could alter all email addresses with
   a prefix in the domain name. For example, `john.doe@example.com` could be changed
   to `john.doe@remove-this.example.com`. For spam bots, this address would be useless,
   as it’s obviously not working. You would however also need to add clear instructions
   to the page that a user MUST manually remove that `remove-this.` part in the 
   address in his email program.
 * However, the best spam protection would probably be to not offer clickable hyperlinks.
   This would require more work for someone who wants to write an email (they would
   have to copy/paste the address from the website to their mail program), but it
   would allow you to “invisible” alter the email address so that it would not be
   recognizable by a spam bot, by adding invisible HTML markup to an address: `john.
   doe@example.com` could be changed to `john.doe<span style="display:none">no@spam
   </span>@example.com`. This would still show up as `john.doe@example.com` (not
   clickable) in the table, but it would not be recognizable by spam bots (unless
   they are smart).
 * As you can see, preventing spam bots from harvesting emails is tricky :-/
 * Regards,
    Tobias
 *  Thread Starter [tonythomasuk@btinternet.com](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tonythomasukbtinternetcom/)
 * (@tonythomasukbtinternetcom)
 * [13 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-hyperlink-within-table/#post-3396351)
 * Thank you Tobias for your time, very helpful and interesting.
    Regards Tony Thomas
 *  Plugin Author [Tobias Bäthge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tobiasbg/)
 * (@tobiasbg)
 * [13 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-hyperlink-within-table/#post-3396352)
 * Hi,
 * sure, no problem! You are very welcome!
 * Best wishes,
    Tobias
 * P.S.: In case you haven’t, please rate TablePress here in the plugin directory.
   Thanks!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The topic ‘Email hyperlink within Table’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/tablepress/assets/icon.svg?rev=3192944)
 * [TablePress - Tables in WordPress made easy](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tablepress/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tablepress/#faq)
 * [Support Threads](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/tablepress/)
 * [Active Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/tablepress/active/)
 * [Unresolved Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/tablepress/unresolved/)
 * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/tablepress/reviews/)

## Tags

 * [email](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/email/)
 * [hyperlink](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/hyperlink/)

 * 5 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Tobias Bäthge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tobiasbg/)
 * Last activity: [13 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-hyperlink-within-table/#post-3396352)
 * Status: resolved