Do you think the whole email me at XXXXXX[at]XXXXXX[dot]com fools the spammers?
I dunno seems like if I was going to design a bot, I'd put in the few simple combinations that the people try to use to fool it.
http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfus...
That said, I use Gmail, and simply don't suffer enough from spam to bother with any other method to reduce it. (And I say this as a guy who was employed writing anti-spam filters for a while.)
Sadly, however, none of these techniques alone will work on a widely spider-able site. If you have a sufficiently large pool of visible email addresses, it suddenly becomes worth while to crack your single method and spider you specifically. I'd prefer to show email addresses in plain text, but if a client begins requesting them too quickly, replace them with a link which pops up a javascript blockade with a captcha.
That said, one of these methods is probably worth using for a single email address on a personal site. However, my email address has been widely distributed in plain text for several years and Gmail has more or less solved the spam problem for me.
Cutting down on spam is almost as good as eradicating it - in the sense that it's damn near impossible to eradicate it anyhow.
Email to amazon and msdn addresses would autoforward to your catchall address - if you found that msdn was spamming you too much, then you can just mark anything coming in on that address as spam. (if their unsubscribe didn't work, that is.
It's a great way to find out who sells their email lists (or has had them stolen). "doostang.com" is a great example of this - I receive a ton of spam from other companies based on the email I used on their website.
Just FYI.
I do exactly that, BUT with one critical difference:
I once had a catch-all address set up for everything@example.com, but I got lots of spam to random made-up addresses. I now use everything@sub.example.com, and I don't see any spammers making up addresses within my subdomain.
Where this unfortunately breaks down seriously is those sites that require you to log in with an email address, and require you to share that login with other people. Especially paypal -- I get spam to my paypal address, because anyone I've ever bought anything from on ebay knows that address. And there is no way to both use that service and keep my email private. There's a variety of similar sites out there.
Spam filters are there to take care of spam, not silly rules that are trivially easy for computers to deal with but harder for humans (who might be scanning for the '@' character on a page simply to see if there is an email address there).
YMMV
Or are you simply using a simple math question (un-captcha'd)?
I've been experimenting with my own db of questions that can be answered with a word - including simple arithmetic and simple reasoning such as "Which is warmer? Hot or cold?" - and finding almost no spammer cares enough about my sites to develop a decoding table for comment submission [that would of course change if I were Amazon, etc.]
All of this is moot, of course, if some spammer were to care enough about auto-registering/emailing my site to get porn-visitors to solve the questions/captchas in order to "see more".
The formmail script then checks for the right answer.
Spam primarily sells shitty stuff for unsophisticated people: if you're bright enough to obfuscate your address, even with [AT] ... [DOT], chances to sell you herbal Viagra or to phish your SSN are very low, there's little point collecting your e-mail address.
OTOH, when spammig your blog comments, the primary audiences are readers and bots, so your net-literacy isn't a disincentive to spam.
The way to look at it is "security through obfustication" - which most people would agree is bad :)
Ultimately I found a better solution: Gmail. Catches almost all of the spam I get - and filters catch newsletters etc. that "slip through" and get them out of the inbox.
On the other hand, GMail's spam filter is so good these days I rarely notice spam so I really shouldn't care whether a bot snatches up my email address or not. Guess it's just habit from the pre-Google years.
Given Gmail's excellent spam filter, I think the practice of disguising an e-mail address is no longer necessary. I haven't received spam on either address.
Has anyone else experimented recently and found something different?
I was tempted to use a Python snippet for that, but decided that maybe some non-geeks should be able to email me too.
Of course, you're out of luck if you have only ever used J, by some crazy coincidence.
So far it has worked well.