Contact information and mailto links should never be published on any website in clear text! This is one of the most common mistakes a "web developer" can make and one that has much wider consequences to it from a security perspective.
All email addresses and mailto links should have an applicable obfuscation technique applied to them so the code within the page masks the email address. You want to ensure that your data cannot be harvested by third parties including Google who uses techniques to parse some of the obfuscation techniques to index this data.
That is if you have any sense of security.
The end result, if done correctly, is that the page still displays the information and in the case of a mailto hyperlink it still functions but the data is obfuscated from the harvesters.
In the case of MDRA's site on the members page all data is clearly visible in the code. In case I am not being clear the issue is not what is displayed on the page from an output perspective, it is the underlying code. These harvesting techniques are not humans clicking on pages manually, it is automated software bots that scour through sites very rapidly and glean the data from the code, then they sell it.
Here is a cut and paste of the code that is the problem, just as an example.
<tr class="vcard odd">
<td class="first_name td td1 ">Michael
</td>
<td class="last_name td td2 ">Pitfield
</td>
<td class="State td td3 ">ON
</td>
<td class="MDRA2017 td td4 ">
</td>
<td class="MDRA2018 td td5 ">
</td>
<td class="Year_Joined td td6 ">
</td>
<td class="user_email td td7 ">
[email protected]
</td>
</tr>
I am not a web developer, I am involved on the security and admin side with a focus on cyber security, so I am not the one to provide a proper solution. I would recommend that MDRA contacts a competent webdev, one that knows a bit more than how to use a CMS and drag and drop.
