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        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> obfuscating email adresses
        
(Message started by: towr on Jan 22^nd, 2006, 11:05am)

Title: obfuscating email adresses
Post by towr on Jan 22^nd, 2006, 11:05am

I've noticed that on the internet people often try to obfuscate their email adress to avoid bots collecting them for spamlists. You have to wonder at how effective they are though. Usually they use a straightforward pattern to 'translate' their emailadress

Do you think any bot would be fooled by e.g. "* at * dot *" (http://www.google.nl/search?q=%22*+at+*+dot+*%22) (25 M hits) or "*.nospam@*.com" (http://www.google.nl/search?q=%22*.nospam%40*.com%22) (1.2 M hits)

I kinda wonder what the point is of doing this. Even considering all the variations on the theme, it's basicly very easy to make a program to extract the actual email adresses.
So how do you obfuscate your email? Or do you simply not post it in public spaces?

Title: Re: obfuscating email adresses
Post by rmsgrey on Jan 22^nd, 2006, 2:53pm

I figure that each level of obfuscation decreases the proportion of bots that'll penetrate the clever encryption.

Also, teaching your bot to recognise e-mail addresses in the first place is that much harder when it doesn't have the handy @ sign to alert it.

If I say "I bought something at amazon dot com", a "smart" bot will probably try e-mailing "something@amazon.com" or "Iboughtsomething@amazon.com" (mind you, this post will probably have a lot of bots fooled anyway)

Title: Re: obfuscating email adresses
Post by JocK on Jan 22^nd, 2006, 2:55pm

Well, put yourself in the shoes of of someone who has a a warehouse full of blue placebo pills, and wants to try and sell these via the web.

Would you send your mass e-mails to people who have gone through the effort of obfuscated their e-mail adresses, or to the (many millions) who have not done so? Would there even be the slightest chance that any of the former would order your pills?

The latter group are a much better target: not obfuscating e-mail adresses on the web shows ignorance, and ignorance is what these spammers need to earn money.

Title: Re: obfuscating email adresses
Post by towr on Jan 22^nd, 2006, 3:24pm

You have a very good point there.
On the other hand, even among the ones that obfuscate their adress, there might be a few who'd buy. And it doesn't really cost anything to send spam to a few million more adresses.

Title: Re: obfuscating email adresses
Post by Grimbal on Jan 23^rd, 2006, 5:45am

There are people who sell e-mail addresses. (and spam people to ask them who wants to buy them :-[)
These probably won't stop at the fact that you try to obfuscate the address.
Also, there might be forum program that automatically obfuscate the address.

One safe way is to convert your email to a .gif. Or just a picture for the @ sign. If you want to allow cut and paste or use the mailto: syntax, you can write a mini-script. Bots won't run scripts. Unfortunately that works well for a web page, not so easily for a signature on a forum.