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Has Google Broken JavaScript Spam Munging?
Baxil writes "For years now, Javascript munging has been a useful tool to share email addresses on the Web without exposing them to spammers. However, Google is now apparently evaluating Javascript when assembling summary text for web pages' listings, and publishing the un-munged email addresses to the world; and spammers have started to take advantage of this kind service." Anyone else seen this affecting their carefully protected email addresses?
The spammers WILL get your email address. Be it web trawling, google searchers, or stealing email address off of compromised computers, the spammers will get, and then resell, you email address.
Trying to keep the spammers from getting your email address is a lost cause, and not a battle worth fighting.
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Javascript did a pretty good job at this
No, it didn't. Google isn't doing anything the spammers couldn't have done themselves with a little bit of Perl.
Not a typewriter
How about "pay to email"?
I register with a pay-to-email site, and give it my actual email address. It gives me my new publicly visible email address. Anyone who wants to can send me an email through this service if they pay me an amount of money that I set. After I receive the email, I can refund the sender. The pay-to-email site takes a 10% cut on all un-refunded emails.
Sound like a winner?
Education is the silver bullet.
For everyone's information: the page the author links to as the one that has javascript munging also has a noscript tag with the email out in the open. Guess what Google and spammers' email-crawlers really do? ;)
I've checked your claim, and it's not true. The "noscript" tag contains warning text about Javascript being turned off and an instruction to use a web form instead of email. I've also checked my own Javascript obfuscation, which uses "blah at domain" type descriptive text in the noscript tag, and Google's search results do not de-obfuscate it. This may be due to the fact that my Javascript is loaded from a separate file -- a point raised in TFA.
Even if Google is rendering some amount of Javascript in this way, it's still a stretch to accuse Google of being the leak. If you correspond with a person who has malware installed on their computer, there's a high risk that your email address will be exposed to spammers via that route. Such malware is hardly uncommon, is it? The obfuscation technique was only ever going to buy a little extra spam-free time in any case.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.