

Please stop using (at) email [dot] com - gghootch
http://garmr.posterous.com/please-stop-using-at-email-dot-com

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s_henry_paulson
This guy openly states that he's using GMail, and assumes that because he
doesn't get much spam that everyone else won't either.

I've worked with proprietary products like Barracudas, and similar open source
systems like MailScanner, and none of them have been as good at stopping spam
and allowing legitimate messages as GMail.

So extrapolating out his sample size of one to the entire internet is a bit of
a stretch.

Further, he assumes that people running these scanners are doing regex type
stuff to get these variations, when it's more likely that 99% of e-mail
harvesters won't bother.

Spending the time to get those few amount of e-mails would not be worth the
time, not to mention, the people that try to obscure their e-mail are probably
the least likely people to buy viagra from some unsolicited e-mail.

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christiangenco
I believe the purpose is just to make it harder (which, really, is the purpose
of security in general).

Of course if a spammer wanted _my_ email address there would be little I could
do to stop them, but a script kiddie that just learned regex and does a
preliminary `wget | grep` won't notice my slightly obfuscated address missing
from the list of billions of low hanging fruit.

While I certainly see your rationale for not "break[ing] the internet," there
are sometimes more important things than usability. If someone can't be
bothered to retype my non-mailto-ified email address, chances are high I'm
better off not being bothered by their email.

~~~
mnicole
"If someone can't be bothered to retype my non-mailto-ified email address,
chances are high I'm better off not being bothered by their email."

This. It is less to do with me worrying about spam as much as it is me adding
an extra layer between myself and people that mass-email myself and others
about employment opportunities, etc. If they really like my work and want to
talk, they won't have an issue typing it out.

~~~
yummysoup
I definitely agree with this on the desktop, but I wonder if it's still true
when folks try to contact you via mobile and they can't keep the browser
window open for reference while entering your address in their email client.

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jack-r-abbit
I've seen this before:

to email me, take off my pants... _mypants_ actualemail@yahoo.com

Probably not very effective but funny. :)

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ilyay
Why not convert the email address to a readable (and mailto-able) format in
javascript?

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cargo8
This is also an awesome little trick:

<span class='reverse'>moc.liamg@liame.my</span>

.reverse { direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: bidi-override; }

~~~
mappu
But you still can't click on it, and if you copy it, it's backwards when you
go to paste it. Well, unless your MUA is aware of rtl, then it looks fine
until the email bounces (and the bounce falls into your spam filter).

Generating the email address in javascript is probably a better solution (and
if you generate it early enough in page load you'll catch proxy browsers like
Opera Mini as well).

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philip1209
Recaptcha's email solution isn't too elegant, but it works:
<http://www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide/>

If you are on a forum, you can link to a page with the Recatcha solution too
(e.g. hosted for free on Github). You could combine it with a contact form
too, and give visitors an option between the two.

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prezjordan
I'm a fan of [name] ... [email] (I.e. joe22 ... yahoo). Gets the point across
in a safe way.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Which is still contrary to the spirit of the article and getting a little
terse for those who dont realise that Yahoo is your email provider.

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shellox
Well, I'm not sure if the author is correct. I'm sure that the spammers use
automated scripts and there also a lot of script kiddies, which just use the
script without knowing how it works. I changed to ..[at].. [dot].. email
notation a while ago and I received much less spam.

I'd to compare it to ssh on port 22. If you run it on the default port you
will notice a lot of failed logins etc. If you change the port to e.g. 8756
you don't get any failed logins anymore, because the script doesn't scan and
just use the default port.

