Passing email addresses from Webflow to Zapier (Script advice)

I have a Webflow form where i’m databinding a dropdown list with items from the CMS to pass over to Zapier for inclusion in my Zaps. I’m using the excellent technique i found here to pull in the CMS Fields that i’m wanting to pass over to Zapier. The dropdown list contains around 80 items. The value string that i’m needing to pass to Zapier contains an email address. See here for example:

<option value="Burbank | email1@company.com | California">California - Burbank</option>
<option value="West St. Paul | email2@companyl.com | No_Group ">Minnesota - West St. Paul</option>

I’m concerned that exposing these emails is not a very good idea and I may be opening them up for possible spam. I assume this is not a best practice.

This is the snippet of the HTML Embed used in the form:

Admittedly, this is a bit beyond my expertise but what i’m thinking of doing is using something like the replace() script method to find the @ symbol and replace it with a preset text like *246810* for example to help disguise the email address. Something like this?:

var str = "West St. Paul | email2@companyl.com | No_Group ";
var res = str.replace("@", "*246810*");

Once in Zapier, i can use their tools to search and replace the *246810* text back to the @ symbol.

So my questions are:

  • Is this a dumb idea?
  • Would this accomplish my goal of disguising the email addresses to help shield them from spam bots?
  • If so, could one of you JavaScript gurus help me with what code i would add to my HTML Embed in order to pull this off?
  • Is there another way of doing this?

Any advise would be much appreciated!

Bryan

1 Like

Bumping this up hoping someone might have some advice…

I would be willing to pay someone to help me with this?

Bots crawl pages with and without javascript running, so trying to hide that which is rendered in the page source code is a waste of energy. If it’s in the source it’s harvested. Which is why we have spam filters in email.

thanks for the reply… Yes, this is why I’m concerned about exposing the email addresses. Currently, in the code, there’s like 80 email addresses exposed. I’m just trying to find a way to either “change” the email addresses via some piece of Javascript when the page is rendered and then I can use Zapier to find and replace the “@” and “.com” back as part the Zap.

I realize it’s kind of a hack but really I’m just trying to figure out A) is it that big of a deal to expose the emails and B) If it is, then how can I do this a better way.

thanks!

It does not matter if you obfuscate the email address. The addresses are in the source. A script would run after the page was rendered already. You can’t hide code on a webflow site since you can’t run server side code.

So I was able to figure out a decent solution to this. If anyone happens across this thread down the road they can read this thread for more info.