Cloudflare error: [email protected] instead of email address

Websites protected by Cloudflare’s web firewall may recently display [email protected] instead of an email address. This is to protect the mailbox from spam; the real address is supposed to be displayed in the browser via JavaScript. This does not seem to be working for several major browsers at the moment, so instead of the address, [email protected] is displayed, with a link to an explanation.

You can work around this by turning off the Cloudflare firewall completely, or by turning off email protection. The feature that is supposed to protect a website’s email addresses and currently displays [email protected] instead is somewhat hidden. Instead of under „Security“ or „Email Addresses“, it can be found at the bottom of the Cloudflare menu under „Scrape Shield“. Here it is called „E-Mail-Adressverschleierung“ in our German screenshot or „Email Address Obfuscation“ in English.

If you disable this feature by moving the switch to the left, email addresses will be displayed again, even if Javascript is disabled: Instead of the Cloudflare message [email protected], the actual email address will be displayed in clear text when Email Address Obfuscation is disabled.

No changes need to be made to the website’s source code: Disabling email obfuscation via Cloudflare fixes the problem immediately and displays the temporarily hidden email addresses again immediately after they are changed.