In my post about "disguising" my email address from spiders by inserting a space between my user name and the "@" symbol, John wondered why it was effective. "Surely anyone competent enough to write a spidering program could also come up with a REGEX to match them," he said.
Well, surely they could. But why go to the trouble when millions of email addresses are out there -without obfuscation - for the taking? Spammers are only as smart as they NEED to be. Until my strategy (or any of the other creatively simply obfuscations out there) becomes widespread, spammers wouldn't bother writing a REGEX around them. Spammers, as I've mentioned before, aren't about to go for ISO certification - they just have to be good enough.
1. That may be true for most spammers. But I've obfuscated my addresses for quite some time now.
One with industrial strength - only a graphic is shown on the page, and then a form with the address hidden inside a script. It can NOT be harvested from the site except by a human! That site is high profile, and I get the occasional spam anyway. About one every other week these days. For quite a while I got nothing, but those days are over.
The other site isn't as high profile, and the e-mail address is obfuscated with e-mail riddler. I have gotten spams there too, but not as often.
There ARE spammers who harvest e-mail addresses by hand, and ANY effort you go to will not stop all spam, as long as another human knows the address or can guess it.
But the less high profile your site is, and the more you obfuscate it, the less spammers will take the trouble.
Posted at 4:51AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Spamhuntress