Last updated 2 November 2026
Yes, when Cloudflare's Email Address Obfuscation is on. On our own site, the <!--email_off--> and <!--/email_off--> markers were removed from the live pages on the main domain, where obfuscation is on, and stayed on the same pages at the site's pages.dev address, where it isn't. Your pages work the same; only a byte-for-byte comparison notices.
Cloudflare's Email Address Obfuscation rewrites email addresses in your HTML to hide them from scrapers. Wrapping part of a page in the two email_off comments tells Cloudflare to leave that part alone. Cloudflare reads those markers, and the page it serves no longer contains them.
Count the markers in your file and in the live page:
grep -c "email_off" privacy.html curl -s "https://yoursite.com/privacy?x=$RANDOM" | grep -c "email_off"
A number in the first and 0 in the second means Cloudflare removed them.
Nothing on your site needs fixing. If a deploy check compares your files with the live site byte for byte, remove exactly those two markers from both before comparing:
sed -e 's/<!--email_off-->//g' -e 's/<!--\/email_off-->//g' privacy.html | sha256sum
Don't remove anything else, so every other difference is still caught.
golproductions.com, 2 November 2026, served through Cloudflare. The file in the build, and the same line on the live page:
file: email <!--email_off--><a href="mailto:support@golproductions.com">support@golproductions.com</a>... live: email <a href="mailto:support@golproductions.com">support@golproductions.com</a>...
5 pages had the markers. On all 5, after removing the markers from the file, the live page matched it exactly.
The same day, the same site at its pages.dev address, where Cloudflare's obfuscation isn't applied: the markers were still in the page, and no address was rewritten. On the main domain, the markers were gone and addresses were rewritten.
Jogga, which we make, checks deploys byte for byte. It removes exactly these two markers on both sides before comparing, and changes nothing else.
We saw this on one site, on 2 November 2026. We couldn't find a Cloudflare page that states the markers are removed.
Does Cloudflare change anything else on the page?
Only email addresses outside the markers, and text that looks like one. On the 5 pages we checked, which had no such text, nothing else changed: once the markers were removed from our file, the live page matched it byte for byte.
Can Cloudflare scramble text that isn't an email address?
Yes. On our site it rewrote npm package versions like @golproductions/flora@1.0.0, because they look like addresses, and visitors saw [email protected] instead. Wrapping that text in the email_off markers keeps it as written.
What does Cloudflare do to emails outside the markers?
With Email Address Obfuscation on, it rewrites them into a protected link that a small script decodes in the browser. The served page then no longer matches your file byte for byte.
Should I stop using email_off?
No. The markers do their job. Only tools that compare bytes need to know they are removed.
Jogga is free.