This is a very good question in my eyes. Email address harvesting is a major problem for public sites, and setting up something similar for telephone numbers would be a trivial affair.

Up until recently (well, really, the launch of the iPhone), the mobile web has been pretty much hidden from public eyes. But its a much more well known beast now, so I've no doubt that this sort of thing will start becoming a problem.

Email filters block out a huge number of spams sent to my main addresses, but there isn't a shred of a filter between the world and my personal mobile phone.

Also, in order to get a number blocked (from ringing and/or texting you) in Ireland you need a formal complaint, submitted to the Gardai (our police force) for harassment, which will hopefully end up with a court order which will force the service provider to block the number in question.

Getting advertising or penis-enlargement spam on my phone is a pretty frightening thought ...

In my opinion there is a risk if it's a mobile number. Nowadays SMS aren't free but cheap enough to be spammed. The usual spam is more like "you have one new message from [girl-name] call back on xxxx (expensive call per min)" rather than phallus complex ads. And so spammer get their money back even faster.
But if you you put a land line number, to an ordinary phone, like a company number or hotel booking, it is less likely to be spammed. Maybe in the future spammers will develop advance voice-bot that can trick people but in most countries it's still way more expensive than sending a text.

... not if you use skype

Indeed that is a frightening thought.... I am a wordpress blogger and there are plugins in wordpress where you can mask the e-mail address automatically. If those tel spam ever develops I am sure that there will be a plugin to mask them too (Matter of a quick tweak).

For the others.... hubba! No clue!

The biggest problem here, is that if you *do* mask them, then click-to-dial will no longer work. You'd be relying on the user remembering your number during the time it takes to exit the browser and dial the call.

Not nice :(

Hi guys. I am a web developer for a large financial institution. We have many pages with email addresses of our staff. To get around the issue of email harvesting I use a site that has a free email encoder. I have just tried this with a phone number and it works on my phone to still bring up the number.

Here is t he site:

http://www.ohlone.edu/org/webcenter/emailencoder.html

Please give it a try and let me know if it also works for you.

Thanks,

MeanMachine - Thanks for the input, but again I think you're missing the whole point of having telephone numbers on a page for mobile devices, and that is that you can literally click on the number to initiate a phonecall.

There's no way of knowing the level of support for what you're suggesting there, and even if it was highly supported, its a very trivial thing to modify a scraper to recognise those entities

:(

Daniel