
ReCAPTCHA Mailhide - cskau
http://www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide/
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codesuela
ReCAPTHA has become such a huge pain to solve. Personally I wouldn't even
bother solving their horrible captcha to get your email unless I REALLY REALLY
need it.

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cj
Is the benefit worth the inconvenience? I've had my email in plain text on my
personal site for the last 2 years and haven't noticed an increase in spam
(thanks to gmail, I suspect).

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rogerbinns
I've had mine on the Internet for well over a decade and run my own mail
server. Plus it is a catch all domain - anything before the @ goes to me.

My mail server is configured to be deliberately slow - taking a few seconds
extra here or there to respond to SMTP commands. This catches out the spammers
who just spew traffic at you ignoring the protocol. Checking sender domains
actually exist plus the Zen RBL gets almost everything else. The dribble that
gets through all that then goes to spamassassin which does a sterling job. (I
make it put messages scoring 5-7 points in a special folder I manually examine
every now and then to double check its effectiveness.)

About the only problem I have had are bad recruiters who have made zero effort
to ensure I am match for their client or vice versa. I even have a "Note to
recruiters" prominently displayed on my resume, but of course the bad ones
aren't going to bother reading that. I have to maintain a list of their
domains to block since that appears to be the only way to stop them.
(Currently 45 entries and counting ...)

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pagekalisedown
Would you be willing to share your list of bad recruiters?

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rogerbinns
I've been threatening to do it for years, and I guess this is as good a time
as any. Note of course that this is based on my experience.

<http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt>

This is my "Note to recruiters"

<http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html>

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pagekalisedown
"As any group of people gets larger, they get collectively slower and
collectively stupider."

Amen!

My personal threshold is around 100 people. Pass 100, and you quickly dive
into Dilbert territory.

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rogerbinns
> My personal threshold is around 100 people

That is probably highly correlated with Dunbar's number

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number>

~~~
pagekalisedown
Very enlightening article, thank you!

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dpkendal
Far more user-friendly is Dan Benjamin's Enkoder.
<http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/>

It requires that JavaScript be enabled for users, but blocks a large number of
spam bots.

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finnw
There's an older trick that still works for me: a passphrase in the subject
line.

You can even include the passphrase in the mailto: uri. E-mail harvesters
usually discard it, but a user who clicks the link (e.g. to compose a message
in Thunderbird) will have their subject field populated.

Now set up procmail to redirect messages to /dev/null if the passphrase is not
present. Now you can freely post the uri all over the web.

Real example:

mailto:aoxomoxoa@finnw.me.uk?subject=Don%22t+buy+this

(I'm confident that no spammer will send bulk messages with "Don't buy this"
in the subject line, so that makes a good default passphrase.)

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kijin
I know someone who always changes the subject line to reflect the content. He
even changes the subject line when responding to other people's e-mails, which
is quite annoying because it often breaks Gmail conversations.

So you'll have to take some measure to tell people not to delete that
passphrase from the subject line. For example, "Don't change or delete this or
it will go into my spam box." But that's verbose.

~~~
finnw
If I send a reply, it comes from a different address (which is not published
and is unaffected by the procmail recipe)

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NameNickHN
This is just another stupid hurdle that people are required to jump over if
they want to use the internet.

If you offer products or services over the internet, stay clear of captcha.
Unless, of course, you give a dam about your conversion rate.

Spam filters are effective enough to keep your inbox clean. There is no need
to play hide and seek with email harvester bots.

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unicornporn
Example: show hello@yourdomain.com in plain text on your site and let it pass
Gmail's spam filter but send the reply from yourname@yourdomain.com if you get
a non-spam message. Use Enkoder ( <http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/> ) if you're
really spam sensitive.

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natesm
Although, if you are hosting your email with Google already, it seems kind of
irrelevant. I happily post my email in `mailto:` form, and I get spam
infrequently enough to happily read through it and laugh at the contents when
I do (it's always the funny ones that make it through).

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pyre
I'm curious why people bother with these posts anymore. It's like some sort of
(self) identity validation. E.g. "Look! I sided with Google and I'm on the
winning side!"

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niklaslogren
It seems the site's encoding is broken somehow. I see only question marks,
instead of the å's, ä's and ö's it should display. (Trying to view the Swedish
version)

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und3f
Same on Russian page.

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tomjen3
A horrible idea -- those who really want your email will just get it when
there is a leak at some big site (ala slicehost forum) and the people you most
want to get news from won't take the time to get your email (except if you are
very famous).

If you are that concerned about spam, let Google handle it -- get your own
domain if you want -- and you don't have to worry too much about it.

justtoproveapoint-neverusedthisbefore@tomjen.net.

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ChrisArchitect
this has been around for years no? Also, in recent months I've started to move
away from using reCaptcha everywhere on webform deployments because of
increased difficulty from, shall we say, the less patient and computer
literate, visitors of my sites.

