YJL

Is that a good idea or the real question is why bother obfuscating in the first place these days?

I was copy-and-pasting an obscure email address, from someone’s blog, in Gmail, which was in the following form:

someone at example dot com

As I was doing that, somehow I began to dream that Gmail would automatically translate or decode it for me. Well, it didn’t do that as you can see in the screenshot below, obscure address on the left, proper one on the right.

You can see Gmail detect it as invalid while the right was correct. If there was such conversion, Gmail could give it a same style as the correct one with a question mark, and user can hover over to know why it’s changed, just like getting the reason of marking an email as spam. Probably another undo icon, in case of wrong conversion, or the user insists on sending into nobody.

I think this automation is not a bad idea, when there are only a few common methods to hopelessly try to prevent spammers gathering email address. Frankly, I don’t believe this kind of methods would really help, it’s just a waste of time, my time and whoever wants to email.

Two years ago, I even tried to find some ways to hide email addresses, but I didn’t believe it is worth the effort even I did use the result. However, a couple of months ago, I just replaced with actual email address literally.

It wasn’t hard to decode and even easier for machine to find, but when it’s useless and meaningless, then it’s unacceptable to waste anyone’s time, make things inconvenient when Gmail or any mail clients already do an adequate job on filtering out spams.

at, (AT), DOT, REMOVE_SOMETHING, however you want to obfuscate, whatever symbols you put in, these doesn’t affect the evil email address collector. I could easily filter them out, probably just with one-line regular expression and it might not even be very long.

Furthermore, make a record of original and collected address pairs, and if the spamming gets 550: No such user here, go back and pull out the original text and send to a human minion for further investigation, then improve the regular expression. See, need not to mess around your email address.

All you are trying to do is not stopping spammers, but only to annoying whoever actually want to contact you without any commercial interest. Just give out your email address plain.

These days, you only need to collect username — or generate, then there is a good chance you can find that person on Gmail. Also, a good common username with a suffix of number like 77, 88, or 123, could hit a few more.

Obfuscation is futile.