Hi @mcarter76,
Thanks for reaching out! WP Mail Logging stores and displays the raw address.
What you’re seeing is a layer between your server and your browser rewriting the email addresses as the page loads. The most common cause is Cloudflare’s Email Address Obfuscation, which is part of their Scrape Shield feature. It scans the HTML of pages served through Cloudflare and replaces email addresses with [email protected] to protect them from bots. It doesn’t distinguish between your public pages and your admin area, so it can affect what you see in your logs.
First, confirm it’s Cloudflare
- Open your WP Mail Logging page.
- Right-click and choose View Page Source.
- Search for
cdn-cgi/l/email-protection or data-cfemail.
If either appears, Cloudflare is the one rewriting the addresses.
If that’s confirmed, here’s how to turn it off
Option 1: Turn it off entirely
- Log in to Cloudflare and select your domain.
- Go to Scrape Shield.
- Switch Email Address Obfuscation to Off.
- Save, then hard-refresh the logs page in your browser (Ctrl+F5 on Windows, or Cmd+Shift+R on Mac).
Option 2: Keep it on for your public site only
If you’d rather keep email addresses hidden on your public pages, you can disable obfuscation for just the admin area. Cloudflare has been migrating this from Page Rules to the newer Configuration Rules, so the exact menu may differ slightly depending on your account:
- Go to Rules, then either Configuration Rules or Page Rules.
- Create a rule matching
*yoursite.com/wp-admin*
- Set Email Obfuscation to Off.
- Save and deploy.
Worth knowing: the global toggle is the more reliable of the two, and it’s what most people end up using. The per-path approach works, but has moved around in Cloudflare’s interface recently.
If you’re not on Cloudflare
Then something else is doing the rewriting. A security plugin or a browser extension that conceals email addresses would be the next places to look.
Let us know how it goes, and if you do track down the cause, we’d be glad to hear what it was.
Thanks!
Hi @darshanaw,
Thanks for clearing that up! Yes, I do use Cloudflare and never enabled the Email Obfuscation feature, but they are always implementing new features without telling us or changing the interface for their dashboard. Thanks for the detailed notes. I will try the second option to see if it’s possible to only obfuscate emails on the public side.
Mike