Re: email address hiding

A recent discussion regarding tricks for concealing your email address may be of interest for some additional tactics to consider. In truth, though, I have to agree with ambrus-the arms-race between concealing and harvesting email addresses is much like that between spamming and spam filtering, in that any time an effective tool comes out on one side, it ups the ante to the other side to develop an effective countermeasure, and there is no end in sight.

Hope that helps.

Comment on Re: email address hiding

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Re^2: email address hiding by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 03, 2006 at 01:21 UTC
However, there's something working in the anti-spam camp's favor as far as hiding email addresses. The mere fact that if you even spend a tiny bit of time hiding an address makes you no longer the low-hanging fruit. As long as a spammer can claim "we will deliver to 80 Million Addresses" which they got from simple scraping, there's no need to decode your entities. On the mail receiving side, nearly everyone is doing some sort of anti-spam things now, so the spammers have to get more clever, and that indeed results in the arms race you describe. Thus, just do something small. It's likely to be enough, for the conceivable future. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]

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Re^2: email address hiding
by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 03, 2006 at 01:21 UTC

The mere fact that if you even spend a tiny bit of time hiding an address makes you no longer the low-hanging fruit. As long as a spammer can claim "we will deliver to 80 Million Addresses" which they got from simple scraping, there's no need to decode your entities.

On the mail receiving side, nearly everyone is doing some sort of anti-spam things now, so the spammers have to get more clever, and that indeed results in the arms race you describe.

Thus, just do something small. It's likely to be enough, for the conceivable future.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

[reply]