Fixing Obfuscated Emails in Gmail with Dotjs | Hacker News Reader

Fixing Obfuscated Emails in Gmail with Dotjs

blog.jazzychad.net

14 pointsjazzychad8 comments

I feel like I should point out that if a script to recognize and fix those common patterns is that simple to create - its just as simple for a spammer/scraper to create. This implies its probably not worth obfuscating your email in the first place....

Agreed. It's better to use something like reCAPTCHA Mailhide (http://www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide/) to protect your email address.

True, I'm not sure how effective such obfuscation is anymore, but for the thousands (millions?) of pages out there that will never be updated, at least this fix will save a few seconds per paste. At the very least it was a fun and satisfying hack.

I don't agree with that necessarily. As someone who used to scrape the web daily, I can tell you that most software doesn't have that level of sophistication...

i read a few days ago about a large-scale-y investigation about "obfuscated" and real email-addresses. it seems that it is better to just write me@example.com instead of me(at)example.com as you can find the second pattern through google queries while you won't find the first one. i.e. google is smart enough to not let scrapers use its index for easy listings.

You're kidding yourself if you think obfuscation is saving you from any spam at this point, and it's just making it harder for legitimate people to contact you. Use a real spam filter and you won't have to bother with fake addresses and obfuscation.

I've been using the same e-mail address since 1999, posting to public mailing lists, signing up for new websites, showing it as a real mailto: link everywhere on my website, and I only get 1 or 2 pieces of spam per day that make it past my spam filter (Postini).

Seems like a nice fix for many cases, though it would parse emails like matt@xyz.com into m.t@xyz.com

Separately, it seems like putting your email into an image is the obfuscate it against spam scrapers who can use tactics like this

no, it looks for other separators around 'at', so it would only replace ' at ' or '_at_' or '[at]' for example. so matt@xyz.com would be safe.

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