Do you want to contact me? Here is my email id: niyazpk [at] gmail [dot] com
What was that?
Why do people encode email addresses in their websites? Is it the best strategy to deal with spammers? What if somebody else publish your email id somewhere else?
It is not about security. It is all about security theatre.
People use email addresses to contact us. It is our Public address. So why should we be afraid of making something public that is suppose to be public?
It is my website/blog. It is my email Id. I am not afraid of putting it in the web so that people who are genuinely interested in contacting me can contact me easily.
Think about the current situation in the internet. Everybody is trying to hide their email addresses behind some random characters so that address scraping bots will not be able to read them. But believe me, even the least sophisticated commercial web-robot can read your obfuscated email addresses. They are very good at it.
Hiding addresses was a good idea at first when only a handful of people employed this trick. Now that everybody is adopting it, spammers have devised ways to read the addresses. We are just adding to the noise of the web by camouflaging real information. It is a shame that we are following this ritual. It is a shame that millions of people are afraid of spammers.
We cannot stop spammers by hiding email IDs. They will get it anyway. Spammers can employ humans who can read addresses. Since reading an email address is a one time job, it is cost effective. I think our email anti-spam mechanisms are sophisticated enough now. We have to make them stronger and smarter. That is the way to go.
So here is my real email ID: niyazpk@gmail.com
You can contact me or spam me in the same address. I am not afraid. Spammers, come. Let us fight.
You are right – this kind of encryption provides no security – a simple regular expression is enough to decrypt it. I even created a sample application to decrypt anti-spamming email encryption
I agree in a way, but another hidden “advantage” of writing your email in an mini-obfuscated form is that it forces people to “care” a bit more to write you an email.
People can already communicate with you using your blog. But if they have to even “think” for 2 seconds to put together your obfuscated email maybe you will stop boring/annoying emails. I very rarely get emailed via my site; but at least the times that it does happen is from people I care about responding to, rather then just random/strange questions.
Thats right, but then you are fighting with the gmails spam protection, which is the best till date…..i use the proper format for yahoo and gmail ids, but not for my domain email since it is not very protective about spam….
Binny,
Thanks for the link to your script. It demonstrates how easy it is to crack this kind of protection.
Silky,
That is another way of looking at it. I did not think that way.
TheAnand,
Using Google Apps, you can use Gmail with your existing domain too.