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Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harversting harder conseal them via obfuscation - @ is replaced with "at" and . is replaced with "dot", so
[email protected] now becomes
team at stackoverflow dot com I'm not an expert in regular expressions and I'm really curious - does such obfuscation really make automatic harvesting harder? Is it really much harder to automatically identify such obfuscated addresses?
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So, keep reading. In general, Email harvesting is the process of collecting a large number of email addresses following some illegal methods. Basically, the purpose of harvesting email addresses is to use in sending bulk emails or for spamming . Email Harvesting can be done through several methods.
The idea behind email obfuscation is simple. You want to make it as hard as possible for website crawlers to capture your email address and use it later on. If you don’t, your inbox is likely to get flooded with ever-so-interesting offers of sophisticated therapies and messages from the long-forgotten uncle that left you a small fortune.
Free offerings: Free products and services are offered for registering with a valid email address. Email Address Harvesting is detrimental and you can be receiving large amounts of spam if you on the spammers’ lists. Though you should be able to unsubscribe from the list, but spammers generally work around this.
The most common method of email harvesting is by using specialized harvesting software known as harvesting bots, or harvesters. Spammers harvests email addresses through various techniques, including:
Definitely!
I read this article a while ago which shows how effective (as well as the relative degree) the various methods can be. Reversing an already reversed string seems to be fairly decent protection at the moment.
The following code sample:
<style type="text/css"> span.codedirection { unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl; } </style> <p><span class="codedirection">moc.etalllit@7raboofnavlis</span></p> Will output the email so it's readable at least.
That said, it is almost an arms race. But as long at you're ahead of the curve, it'll be more effort to harvest your address rather than ordinary un-obfuscated ones.
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