Email encryption for the web
At Pittsburgh’s Web Analytics Wednesday, I told the story of this post whereby I mistook someone’s email address for an alternative website address. Dan Halpern of Duquesne University said, “Why do people circumvent the bots with ‘myname at gmail.com’ text, when they can just encrypt their email address?” He then sent me a link to this email encoder site. (It looks like there are a lot of encoders out there, just type in spambot encoder.)
I tried it and it works (but I don’t know if bots caught onto this one long ago.) Here’s what this particular encoder says about themselves:
This form will allow you to encode your e-mail address through the use of Character Entities, transforming your ascii email address into its equivalent decimal entity. Simply enter your regular e-mail address in the first text box, click the encode button, and then highlight and copy the resulting code produced in the second text box. This encoded e-mail address can be read and translated back into its original ascii text by almost any web browser without any further action on your part. Just replace all instances of your e-mail address on your pages with the code, and you won’t have to worry about spam lists.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
May 14th, 2006 at 3:06 am
Wow,
this is a really neat solution to communicating with my readers without being spammed to death.
The method used to do this in URL encoding. Can I repost this on my site as well (with credits)?
May 14th, 2006 at 3:09 am
Sorry,
Forgot to mention my website’s address which is: http://ohad-news.blogspot.com
May 14th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Sure, you can copy the whole thing as long as you link to my site in the post. (I probably should get a Creative Commons license but I need to do today’s post. And do real work. And call my mother.)
Robbin
May 14th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Why not just replace *one* character with its respective encoding?
That keeps the code small and readable while still ensuring most spambots cannot use the address.
May 14th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Has anyone seen any testing/research to see if this method is currently ignored by spam harvesters? The key word being currently.
My concern is that to decode this obsfuction is a one liner in perl, so it’s not exactly hard for the spam harvesters to “break”.
I’d also be a bit leery of the sites providing the obsfuction service - they may be spam harvesters themselves.
But then I’ve always been a cynical, paranoid type.
Steve