Email spam protection idea

After a rather interesting discussion on how to obfuscate emails on the frontend – me pointing out that most techniques are rather inaccessible and make spam the problem of the visitor – I came up with the following idea:

What if you set up your email links by linking to a page:

The PHP page then checks the referrer page and compares it with its own host IP, gets the email from a database or other mean of storage and sends back a ‘mailto:’ header:

header('Location:mailto:'.$email);


Wouldn’t that be a quite safe solution for the problem?

• Note: Of course a web form is the best option as it does not need an email client tool.