Tips & Tricks

Re: WRONG! Re: Protecting Your Email Address

briton — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:43:40 GMT

I wasn't slamming. I was pointing out that using the <space><parenthesis>AT etc type of "obfuscation" is a little dumb when you can truly obfuscate.

The image method is great and I wasn't knocking it. But it does beg one simple question.... if you want to put an email address into your HTML code, presumably you like your users/readers enough to allow them to use a mailto: link. If not, end of discussion I think.

But if you DO want your image to have a mailto: link, i.e. you click the image and it opens your email client with a blank outgoing message with the email address in the image already on the To: box, then your image method is no longer cheating the email harvesting bots out of their crop because both the mailto: tag and the email address itself are still going to be sitting there in the code waiting to be harvested.

That was my (I hope constructive) criticism of the OP in suggesting the solutions and tests meant something. OK go ahead, use your image - but if you want a mailto: link to make the image clickable, you are back to having to use an encoding method anyway so why bother to include the image at all! Remember that the bots are looking at the HTML code, not what you see on the screen whereas users are looking at what is on the screen. That is why the encoding method will put on the screen the IDENTICAL image that you would get if you just put in your email address in a mailto: link. Which is the perfect solution isn't it? Encode something so that users see the same thing which has the same clickable functionality but the harvesting bots don't even know there is a mailto: link? Sound good to me!

As I say, if you can show me how to use my (bloated) image as a mailto: link without using encoding type obfuscation and stop a harvester seeing it, I will add it to our security and privacy advice pages.

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

bhess — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:49:31 GMT

nice info

Re: WRONG! Re: Protecting Your Email Address

TheLarrikin — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:00:07 GMT

Or... just use an image. It takes so much knowledge and knowhow as to run MSPaint. I know. I said it. Even if you don't have Photoshop (which is what I use), you can do it. Heck, you can also do it in Frontpage. Save out a random single pixel in whatever program you use, and set up Frontpage's Text overlays for images (or whatever they call it now). I'm sure this is applicable in other editors, too. I'll tell you, it's a heck of a lot easier than scripting, even if you already have one made up for you.

Re: WRONG! Re: Protecting Your Email Address

heat511 — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 00:57:24 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation

Obfuscation is simply hiding information. You can do that by writing complicated scripts for no reason or by simply making something hard to read, either one accomplishes the same purpose or attempts to at any rate. I see no reason to slam the OP because you have a "better" way to obfuscate your email addy.

WRONG! Re: Protecting Your Email Address

briton — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:09:12 GMT

Sorry to disappoint people who thought this was good advice, but the original poster does not understand what "email obfuscation" is!

Email obfuscation is not doing things like changing the "@" to "at" and so on. Email obfuscation is encoding the entire email address (including, if you are bright, the "mailto:") so that in the HTML there IS no email address. Simply some javascript or jscript which, when the page is compiled by the browser, displays an email address to the person viewing the webpage. Bots can't find it because it doesn't exist in the HTML code. But people can read it just like any other email address and click on it or select it and copy it - because the browser has interpreted the script to display the email address.

Yes, eventually bots could be coded to decipher this, but when there are so many plain email addresses out there, why would they bother?

I personally use my own encoding script which generates some random numbers to create the code and it's deciphering code. But if you want to read about obfuscation and even create your own obfuscated email HTML/script code, try this link: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/spam/spam.htmand the subpage: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/spam/spam.htm (thanks to Tim Williams of The University of Arizona!). That page explains how the page obfuscates. Add some clever stuff to your own script like random numbers being used to multiply and add/subtract and using more than one character code (or just use something other than ISO-Latin-1) so that the bots aren't even going to harvest you even if they are re-coded to interpret that particular obfuscation method. As shown on the websites I have linked you to:

"Your email will appear as 60, 97, 32, 104, 114, 101, 102, 61, 34, 109, 97, 105, 108, 116, 111, 58, 116, 105, 109, 109, 121, 119, 64, 97, 108, 111, 104, 97, 46, 110, 101, 116, 34, 62, 116, 105, 109, 109, 121, 119, 64, 97, 108, 111, 104, 97, 46, 110, 101, 116, 60, 47, 97, 62 to an email harvesting progam"

After that? Well, why not get your own domain name(s) and have as many aliases as you like so that if one gets compromised, firstly you will know who compromised it or where it was compromised and avoid that person/site and secondly you can delete the email address so that further spam gets bounced by your mail server (you don't even GET the spam to filter out) plus the spammers' software will automatically delete that email from the lists or in any case subsequent spam will get bounced repeatedly without coming near your email client AND will waste the resources of the spammers.

(And for the iPot, may I suggest that in future you, as an EggXpert, should investigate your ideas a little further before posting? What you were referring to was some kind of "veiled speech" system, not "obfuscation"! If you investigate this and understand, I would hope you would add to your little video wherever else it is posted too!)

(In my humble opinion, it's hard to believe anyone giving advice on privacy uses gmail but that's an entirely different level of personal information harvesting! :P)

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

64mb — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:19:13 GMT

Yep! (I had external images turned off on accedent)

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

TheLarrikin — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 18:40:35 GMT

It's not a link, just plain text.

What the video says is basically that search engines ignore the '@' and '.', and can't tell an email address that way. if you search for "*@*.*", you won't get anything useable. If you search for "*[at]*[dot]*", though, you'll get quite a few hits of people wanting to hide their email address that way, because the engine doesn't ignore the 'at' wording or the 'dot' wording.

The best way is to type your email out as an image, and display the image. The little spam harvesters can't read the text from your image, and it's not easy for people to simply copy-n-paste, either. It deters multiple forms of spam email harvesting.

Does that make more sense? :)

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

64mb — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:59:17 GMT

How is linking your e-mail better for protection than the [at] [dot] ?

Best is always nothing but sometimes that's not an option unless you make a yahoo e-mail for the job.

What about email @ place.net ?

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

TheLarrikin — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:54:40 GMT

Worst: email [at] website [dot] com

Better: email@website.com

Best:

* * *

This should have been done a while ago for our friends with lower bandwidth. Hope this helps.

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

64mb — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:54:52 GMT

Would someone please consider putting the tips in the vid into text form?

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

Jennifer — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:23:09 GMT

Good post. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

ElGreco — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 02:47:25 GMT

Is that entirely accurate? I have one (junk) account with which I always use the username@domain.com format and another where I do the [dot] (com) format and the first format e-mail receives hundreds of spam every day while the other receives next to none.

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

mateojg — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 04:07:21 GMT

I completely failed the first test, well I knew a picture was better but I picked the [at] (com).Good info.

I want to add to the tips although it's more of an informative thing than a way to avoid spam. Gmail has one of the GREATEST features ever. You can add a note to your e-mail. For example

As we all know you can't get into eggxpert.com without signing up. Well instead of using my regular e-mail address at username@gmail.com I can say username+eggxpert@gmail.com by adding the plus sign I am able to track down what emails are sent to me from eggxpert. This is important in spam because lets say eggxpert sells my e-mail to a spam company then I would get their e-mails sent to username+eggxpert@gmail.com (since that's the e-mail I gave them) and I would know they sold me out. Of course eggxpert would never do that but if they ever did I would know why I'm getting spam that I wasn't getting before and who gave out my e-mail address.

I am not the best at explain things so here is a link at someone that does a better job: http://techtites.com/2007/03/01/tip-thursday-track-incoming-spam-with-gmail-plus-addressing/

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

Kaffeguy — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 18:44:04 GMT

Very informative.. Thanks

Re: Protecting Your Email Address From Spammers

iPot — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:01:55 GMT

TheLarrikin:

you could spread the word via mass spam emails...

nice idea...but i dunno how... any spam tutorial ?