Protect your e-mail address

I'm not sure if this PC Mag article is more interesting due to its content, or due to the fact that it is dated as having been published June 22, 2004... which is currently the future.
Were I posting from the future, I would want to pass on more info than just how to protect one's e-mail address.

Regardless, this man from the future does indeed relate a tale of how to protect your e-mail address online.

The main point of this article seems to be that upon some level of testing that was done, this could be seen:

The easiest way is to spell out the "@" sign and the period, like this: brian at example dot com. In the Center's study, addresses that had been obscured in this simple way on Web pages did not receive a single piece of spam.

This is retarded in many ways, but correct in many others.
Just because you do that, it doesn't negate the ability for spam harvesting bots to get your e-mail address - all they need to do is a search on the page for: word space "at" space word space "dot" space word - where that last word is "com", "edu", "org", or "net" and they will get the bulk of the content.
But it will indeed bypass the old and simple e-mail harvesting programs.

The article also states that you could put your e-mail address into an image. That prevents blind people from seeing it, and if you are a commercial entity in the States, that leaves an opening for them to sue you - the same problem that my proposed concept (and the ensuing great ideas from others that were spawned by that) falls to. That idea being essentially the same as the image, but entirely created via HTML and CSS tags.

He then mentions that there are other ways to encode it as well - which incidentally is essentially what MovableType (The software that runs this blog) does to e-mail addresses you enter.
The downsides to those are still issues with either blind (sorry, "vision impaired") reader programs or people that have JavaScript turned off.

In the end, the best thing is to be aware of the problem and know that there are certain things that are more likely to either get harvested, or get you on to lists.
If you buy something off of a reputable dealer online (Amazon?), then they likely aren't going to send your e-mail spam (outside of their settings of notifications and "you might like this" if you have that allowed in your profile).
They also aren't in a position where they need to sell your address in order to make more money (this was a big problem during the "dot bomb" era when as a last ditch effort, companies were selling off their user contact info in order to recover some of their money.

But if you are on a site that sends greeting cards, or is a gambling site, or porn, or any number of things that are more of a fringe area of the net - you are very likely to get harvested and/or sold off for a quick buck.

Posted by Eric at June 5, 2004 12:27 PM | TrackBack