Is it worth obfuscating email addresses on the web these days?

Question

There are various ways to obfuscate email addresses on the web, but most of them don't work when you need to have a mailto: href.

I generally use name[AT]domain.com, because I think it's fairly obvious to the user what they have to do to get a real email address, but I wonder if there's any benefit to this (as it's easy to automate by a spammer). I'm aware of the services which hide the email address behind a captcha, but to me this is too much work for the user.

So, two questions:

1. Is there any way that (a) retains the use of mailto: links, (b) will stop spammers and (c) isn't too complicated for non-power users to work out?

2. Is it worth it? Do we just accept that spammers will find a way round it and just use Gmail?

Edit: I should mention that, in this specific case, I'm talking about the contact email address for the companies whose websites I'm making, on their websites.

Answer 1

On websites I maintain, I consider it my duty to protect my user's email addresses. Spam is bad enough, I don't need to make it easy for the spammers.

At the same time, usability demands functional mailto links. My favorite method for achieving this is to use the free SpamSpan technique (at paranoia level 3). It is free, cross-browser, seems effective, and leaves easy-to-read text when JavaScript is disabled.

Sample HTML

<span class="spamspan">
<span class="u">user</span>
[at]
<span class="d">example [dot] com</span>
</span>

Result (JavaScript enabled)

[email protected]

Result (JavaScript disabled)

user [at] example [dot] com

Answer 2

IMHO, there's no good reason to obfuscate emails. Spam filtering can be done quite well automatically by third party services so it's not really your or your users problem, yet retrieving a working email is a barrier however small in communication, which is.