
Protecting your email with 'AT domain DOT com' is making it easier to find - taylorbo
http://varenhor.st/2010/01/email-at-domain-dot-com-is-making-a-spammers-job-easier/
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olalonde
Whatever, I never get spam with Gmail.

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tome
How do you know Gmail doesn't misclassify valid mail as spam? This is what
terrifies me about the thought of using a spam filter: false positives.

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sjs382
I don't know, but I don't sweat it either. Anyone who is sending me super-
important email has other ways of contacting me if they don't get a response.
And in the case that they dont, a missed email still isn't the end of the
world.

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prawn
If you rely on business leads where the sender is also contacting competitors,
those "others ways" won't always matter and you'll just miss the job. That's
my concern.

That said, I openly list my email address online (and have with the same
address for 12+ years) and have really average filtering that leaves me
deleting spam that slips through and chasing down false positives.

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zoba
I haven't heard of any email harvesters getting around my Email Icon Generator
(yes, it is the original!). Just enter your email and it gives you an image of
your email address to link to.

<http://services.nexodyne.com/email/>

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olalonde
Nice tool, although embedding images isn't always an option. Thanks for
sharing.

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eli
My experience shows that simple bots looking for mailto: links still work just
fine. I doubt many spammers are going to go through the trouble of decoding
even simple obfuscation.

There used to be a website where a guy actually tried different methods for
posting an email address on the web and then measured the number of junk
messages at each address. Wish I could remember where I saw it.

~~~
eli
Here it is: [http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-
obfus...](http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e-
mail-addresses-compared/)

A bit dated now, but using AT and DOT cut the spam to basically negligible
levels.

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xtho
It's quite interesting that the javascript-version got more spam than the
simple AT/DOT one. That's surprising---at least to me it is.

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bonsaitree
Why is this news?!

Follow Postel's law and simply apply (ever cheaper) horsepower to filtering on
the back-end + gray-listing & white-listing. This IS NOT rocket science
people.

If one can write a regular expression to parse the "obfuscated" content, it's
just one more rule in a markov validation chain in a data mining script.

"...Same as it ever was..."--The Talking Heads

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jamesshamenski
I like to say James2456 of Gmail it's the avant garde thing to do

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sjs
I like that. I've been using "my.username at gmail" ... fairly close but I
might switch to "of". As a bonus it might filter out humans you'd rather not
converse with as well.

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rtomayko
I recommend "me MONKEY TAIL domain FULL STOP com".

More: <[http://ascii-table.com/pronunciation-guide.php>](http://ascii-
table.com/pronunciation-guide.php>);

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dan_sim
A basic search also returns things like "XYZ(AT)gmail(DOT)com",
"XYZ[at]gmail[dot]com" and xyz.at.gmail.dot.com . It returns everything, no
matter how clever you think you are. And it's not that hard to write a regexp
that replace this all into your actual email...

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Retric
My gmail address is not fark.sam, but if it was you could still figure it out.
Getting a regex to do that correctly would be a pain. As would replace the v
with a n in avother@gmail address. Still my gmail account was getting spam
before I started to use it. So I think simple spray and pray approaches will
catch most people.

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techiferous
On my about page, I simply display my email address as an image instead of
text. <http://techiferous.com/about/>

This does have significant disadvantages, the worst being that users cannot
cut and paste the address.

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est
cache:

[http://74.125.153.132/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://varenh...](http://74.125.153.132/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://varenhor.st/2010/01/email-
at-domain-dot-com-is-making-a-spammers-job-easier/)

tl;dr: you can search 'AT gmail DOT com' on google

I think this technique has been doing by spammers for decades.

The best way to prevent email harvest bots is to use DOM+JS, something like

    
    
        <span id='my_span' my_chars='onix'>elec</span>tr
        <script id='my_script' language='javascript'>document.write(document.getElementById("my_script").parentNode.firstChild.getAttribute('my_chars')+String.fromCharCode(0x74, 0141, 115-1))</script>
        @gmail.com

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varenc
The trouble with these and some other solutions (like use of imgs), is that
they aren't an option on something like linkedin.com or a forum where users
can only post text!

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est
1\. use a special account for special sites

2\. use id+mask@gmail.com or anything that can filter

3\. something like this
myemail_REMOVE_UNDERSCORE_AND_CAPITALIZED_TRAILING@gmail.com

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jgrahamc
You could always use JEAIG: <http://jeaig.org/>

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gahahaha
but it signifies that I am competent enough to not reply to spams

