Some people think email obfuscation is a good way to fight spam, that it's somehow more difficult for spammers to understand "account at domain dot com" or "account&64;domain.com" than "account@domain.com". These people are wrong. They will often readily admit that they don’t think email obfuscation will stop all spam, but it still makes them feel like they’re doing something in the war on drugs terrorism spam. Here's what they're doing: in addition to making email more difficult for legitimate uses, they're actually making it easier for spammers.
Google returns 27 million results for "* at * dot com". That's 27 million email addresses waiting to be spammed. Google doesn’t allow you to search for the "@" sign, so that’s 27 million email addresses that wouldn’t be available on Google if they were not obfuscated. Email obfuscation not only doesn’t hurt spammers — it actually helps them. Where it doesn’t make it easier, it acts as a placebo, making people feel more comfortable and complacent living in a world of spam. Like everything else, if you don’t want your email address publicly-available, don’t put it on the public web. But if we want to be able to publish email addresses on the web, we can’t continue this half-hearted war on spam, hiding under our beds of obfuscation and hoping they won’t find us.
Sorry for the plug, but this seems relevant - we created reCAPTCHA mailhide to help stop this problem, it's available free for individual and website use - http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/
-Mike Crawford, Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.openjs.com/scripts/regexp/email_decrypter.php
"Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query."
Images don't work for blind people, and I'm more willing to exclude people who can't do math than people who can't see. "2 + one" stops the vast majority of spam bots, in my experience. The rest I catch by moderating all comments with links.
reddit.com -- you're on the front page.
There are obviously some idiots out there who respond to them, but they are not likely to be the ones that are going out of their way to avoid spam.
Personally, I've got my own domain name and use companyname@mydomainname.com or websitename@mydomainname.com whenever I register somewhere. If I do start getting spam at that specific address, I just redirect it to junk. Pretty effective so far.
not a valid mail AND not searchable
but it's obvious what to do to fix it
--Then what's the point of having that e-mail address at all???
There are obviously some idiots out there who respond to them, but they are not likely to be the ones that are going out of their way to avoid spam.
Personally, I've got my own domain name and use companyname@mydomainname.com or websitename@mydomainname.com whenever I register somewhere. If I do start getting spam at that specific address, I just redirect it to junk. Pretty effective so far."
Right, and the Christian Republicans are the least likely to be gay, molest kids, or cheat on their wives.
For example fredyyyy@provider.com where yyyy is the year, I know that it is simple if not simplistic, but it does take spammers a while to catch up.
It needs to be easy so that people that you know can figure it out.
user [ img src=at_.gif] domain.com
If you wish to be proactive, report your spam as you receive it eg spamcop.net
I don't mind this anti-spam game.
Anyway, that's not the only kind of obfuscation, and not the kind I use. I'm well aware it's easy enough for spambots to pick up the meaning of something like foo at blah dot com, because it's regular. But how about something like: foo@throwthispartout.blah.thistoo.com.andthis?
The solution cannot be purely technical.
Try a mixed ISO/Hex obfuscator like this one:
http://www.seowebsitepromotion.com/obfuscate_email.asp
I get excellent results, and it overcomes every problem previously mentioned on this page.