Is E-Mail Obscuration Worth It?

ThenAgain asks: "Many sites obscure e-mail addresses by adding noise (like 'STOPSPAM') or by translating the punctuation into words (Ex: 'me at domain dot com'). This makes users feel good but does it actually help? Ten lines of perl could defeat any of the present schemes with ease and the spammers have shown plenty of adaptability. So if we're not helping hold back the flood of spam, why are we decreasing the utility of the web by eliminating mailto tags and forcing users to hand-correct the addresses in their mail clients?"

Comments

Re:try this

[gmhowell]

Also, us Americans are woefully ignorant, even of our own geography. I was going to send mail to poughkeepsie354@hotmail.com

My technique...

[Txiasaeia]

...is to make an address completely unreadable to anybody but a human. For example:

kajohnson@hotmail.com BECOMES
kay_a_sonofjohn_atuh_hawtmayled0tcawm_(first_word_ letter_second_word_letter_switchfifthandthird_word _getridof_of_restofaddress_is_phoenetic)

Sure, it's brutal to decipher, but there's no way a machine can poke through that mess. Fun for the receiver to figure out too :)

Re:10 Lines?

[ThenAgain]

Cool.. So, what ten lines do you recommend?

Here it is in nine:

#! /usr/bin/perl

while(<>) { while(/([a-z0-9]+\@[a-z0-9.]+\.(com|org|net))/gi) { $a = $1;
$a =~ s/[A-Z]+[0-9]*[A-Z]*//;
print("$a\n");
} while(/([a-z0-9]+ at ([a-z0-9]+ dot)+ (com|org|net))/gi) { $a = $1;
$a =~ s/ at /\@/i;
$a =~ s/ dot /\./ig;
print("$a\n"); } }

A real Perl hacker could probly do it in three, in the shape of a camel.

Re:10 Lines?

[G. W. Bush Junior]

ThenAgain is actually a spammer...
he figured out that rather than learning perl in order to harvest e-mail adresses more efficiently, he could simply post the question to slashdot and someone would do it for him ;)

think about it :P