TYPO3 Core

The spamProtectEmailAddresses "ascii" intends to fool crawler bots to misinterpret an email and therefore "protect" the e-mail adress.

In my opinion this does not work anymore, since someone could easily add a rule to an email crawler to check if the part after the mailto: contains @ and if it does not it could simply try to htmlentities_decode and get the value out this way.

Therefore the SPAM protection of the ascii option is as good as simply putting the email adress out there without any encryption.

I suggest therefore to deprecate this option for TYPO3 10.x and remove it with TYPO3 11. In order to make migration easier, the ascii value could be replaced by something that is known to be safe, like -5.