D. Strout
Resident IPv6 Proponent
Like it or not, we often have to post our e-mail addresses online. And that attracts spammers. I've seen some pretty elaborate "anti-spam" measures to disguise one's e-mail address from spammers. But these anti-spam measures forget some pretty simple principles of how e-mail addresses look. E-mails usually have a limited number of characters, and the period and @ symbols are replaced with pretty standard stuff. As a proof of concept, I made an anti-anti-spam script that takes your "spam-proof" address and returns it to its normal form.
Mostly it was in response to the elaborate e-mail disguising which I saw at the end of HTTP Zoom's recent offer. All the slashes and brackets and such can be discarded, since you don't see those in e-mail addresses. Ditch spaces and you're good to go. They didn't even change the @ and period. You get my point.
You can find the script here. Try throwing it your e-mail as you usually write it online and see if it holds up. If it does, good for you, post your method here. If not, check out the source and see how it works so you can improve. It is by nature rather "greedy": it will convert anything it can. Spammers can miss a fair number of e-mail addresses, they don't care. If you really want to evade this sort of thing, put a slash in your e-mail. It is valid, between quotes.
Some examples of addresses that will be made "spammable" by this:
MyEmail [remove] AT my (no-spam) e_mail DOT n-e-t
[removethis] my-email [A-T] _ something DOT com
myemail AT myemail DOT com
myemail [@] myemail [.] com
The biggest issue is determining strings to remove. Right now it removes "remove", "removethis", and "nospam", but you could use something else. If I were to beef this up, I could probably tell it to remove anything between brackets. Or I could get really fancy and see if most of the characters are lowercase, and if so, remove uppercase characters. The point is, once you get past ditching brackets and spaces and stuff, it becomes hard for the computer to determine what else doesn't belong.
Mostly it was in response to the elaborate e-mail disguising which I saw at the end of HTTP Zoom's recent offer. All the slashes and brackets and such can be discarded, since you don't see those in e-mail addresses. Ditch spaces and you're good to go. They didn't even change the @ and period. You get my point.
You can find the script here. Try throwing it your e-mail as you usually write it online and see if it holds up. If it does, good for you, post your method here. If not, check out the source and see how it works so you can improve. It is by nature rather "greedy": it will convert anything it can. Spammers can miss a fair number of e-mail addresses, they don't care. If you really want to evade this sort of thing, put a slash in your e-mail. It is valid, between quotes.
Some examples of addresses that will be made "spammable" by this:
MyEmail [remove] AT my (no-spam) e_mail DOT n-e-t
[removethis] my-email [A-T] _ something DOT com
myemail AT myemail DOT com
myemail [@] myemail [.] com
The biggest issue is determining strings to remove. Right now it removes "remove", "removethis", and "nospam", but you could use something else. If I were to beef this up, I could probably tell it to remove anything between brackets. Or I could get really fancy and see if most of the characters are lowercase, and if so, remove uppercase characters. The point is, once you get past ditching brackets and spaces and stuff, it becomes hard for the computer to determine what else doesn't belong.
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