Obfuscating email addresses in mailto: links

[JL]

Hi all

The other day, I encountered a site with a mailto link like this:

<a
href="mailto:[email protected]">
(e-mail address removed)
</a>

Will this actually prevent anything from harvesting the email address?

Thanks

 

[Andy Dingley]

Will this actually prevent anything from harvesting the email address?

No, but it will discourage it. Empirical studies suggest that this
simplistic obfuscation does have significant measurable effect on
discouraging the harvesting of new email addresses for spamming.

 

[John Hosking]

The other day, I encountered a site with a mailto link like this:

<a
href="mailto:[email protected]">
(e-mail address removed)
</a>

Will this actually prevent anything from harvesting the email address?

Would it prevent *you* from doing so (if you were so inclined)? No
(presumably), because you know what the f codes are and can
translate them back to the real ASCII-style human-readable address. A
computer program would only make it quicker for you.

This example is weaker than some, because the mailto: is not obscured
and an address harvesting program (which is made to do just that) will
see the mailto: and probably grab the rest, too. The spam is on its way!

When I do this, I munge the whole content C of the href="C".

When all or most harvesters are programmed to detect/translate this
kindof munging, the technique will be useless (or worse, because of the
bulk). But right now, I think most of the harvesters just pass right
over, going for the multitudes of more obvious addresses. There's no
shortage of that "low-hanging fruit".

 

[andrew]

Hi all

The other day, I encountered a site with a mailto link like this:

<a
href="mailto:info@exa&#109 ;ple.com">
e.com
</a>

Will this actually prevent anything from harvesting the email address?

I have used this technique and it has proved very successful. Because
I am a little lazy I used the following:

http://www.addressmunger.com/

to generate the mess A gentleman named Nikita published a page in
which he spoke of spam / email addresses which is well worth reading:

http://nikitathespider.com/articles/IngenReklamTack.html

All the best,

Andrew

 

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

I have used this technique and it has proved very successful. Because
I am a little lazy I used the following:

http://www.addressmunger.com/

to generate the mess

I use this shell script:

## Convert e-mail address to obfuscated format for web pages
## Author: Chris F.A. Johnson, copyright 2007
w2()
{
w2h=$1
while [ -n "$w2h" ]
do
temp=${w2h#?}
printf "$2" "'${w2h%"$temp"}"
w2h=$temp
done
}

mailto="mailto:"
anchor='<a href="'
gt=">"
closetag="</a>"

url=$( w2 "${1// /}" "%%%x" )
daddr=$( w2 "$1" "&#%d;" )

link="$anchor$mailto$url\"$gt$daddr</a>"

printf "%s\n" "$link"