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E-mail obfuscation

The method that I'm currently using to obfuscate (hide) e-mail addresses is meant to thwart spambot e-mail address harvesters. These are the nasty little programs that go from page to page on the web looking for things that look like e-mail addresses and collecting them so that spammers have new victems to pester.

For the most part, these harvesters are pretty simple-minded programs. A March, 2003 study by the Center for Democracy & Technology (http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml) suggests that an obfuscation technique as simple as the one that I'm using should be sufficient to keep the spammers off your electronic doorstep.

I use a two pronged approach:

  1. convert the "@" into a graphic, so that it slips through text searches
  2. convert the alphanumeric characters into html escape sequences

If anyone begins to receive spam that they believe resulted from an address harvester visiting this site, please contact me so that I can change the obfuscation! I have another, stronger technique already to hand, but it's rather more trouble, since you have to pass a test that proves that you are a human being (and not just a computer program) before you can see the e-mail address... but I'd like to put off fielding that one, if at all possible.

This page is maintained by David Swan (a.k.a. Henry MacQueen), henrythescholarsgarret.com

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