Email Obfuscation Techniques

Wander Nauta info at wandernauta.nl
Tue Apr 12 02:47:41 EDT 2011


I agree, entity-encoded mailto: links work quite well. They may not work
forever, though, and some Drew McLellan made a good point
here<http://typewriting.org/2006/06/19/Email_Obfuscation_Helps_Spammers/>

:


In some ways, obfuscated addresses are even more valuable

to spammers, as the very act of obfuscation could suggest

that the address is important to someone.


Once you put something out on the Web, it's availible for everyone to
read - and that includes spambots. If only people stopped buying
things from these spammers...

Cheers,
Wander

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 02:49, Lou Quillio <public at quillio.com> wrote:


> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Arno Hautala <arno at alum.wpi.edu> wrote:

> > The other thread brought to my attention that only the <email> syntax

> > obfuscates mailto links. Plus, while the entity encoding technique

> > probably fools some scrapers, I doubt it's all that effective.

>

> Incredibly, it's still very effective. Back when I kept a personal

> site with actual content, I kept an entity-encoded mailto: link to

> asswipe at quillio.com on all pages. For maybe eight years (up until

> about four years ago), that alias never received a message. I still

> use entity-encoding mailtos on public sites and don't have the

> impression that they're scraped.

>

> I think the harvesters are all about low-hanging fruit, and decoding

> is still more expensive than it's worth. Might change some day, but

> doesn't seem to have -- yet.

>

> LQ

>

>

> --

> Lou Quillio

> http://quillio.com/

> public at quillio.com

> +1 518.285.0003 (gVoice)

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