Linkage

ASCII Email Address Encoder

~ 03 November 2005 ~

ASCII email address encoder. Been using this for a little while now, mostly for contact info on Gigabits listings. Though I question how effective it really is in hiding email addys from spam spiders — anyone know? (Comments are on.)

Brian breslin ~ 03 November 2005 at 10:53 AM

http://automaticlabs.com/products/enkoder have you tried this? it seems to work pretty well.


Cameron Moll ~ 03 November 2005 at 10:56 AM

No. Apparently I missed that from Dan. Anyone else have success with it or other methods?


Bart ~ 03 November 2005 at 11:58 AM

There's a (dated) article on ALA about the issue.

I believe that in the ensuing discussion, it was argued that the decoder mentioned by Brian is a very good way of fighting off spammers. The only counterargument was that JavaScript is required.

I do have my doubts about the ASCII-method. Someone tested a few protection schemes in the ALA-discussion and found out that spambots are quite capable of bypassing it.


Bart ~ 03 November 2005 at 12:04 PM

HTML link disappeared. Sorry.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/spam/


Blair ~ 04 November 2005 at 09:00 AM

I prefer RAILhead's Spamstopper to accomplish the same task. There's also Email Cloaker for Web, and others too, I'm sure.

Regarding effectiveness... Hard to gauge. Obviously, if the technique really takes hold, the harvesters will simply be upgraded. On the other hand, I don't think I get as much spam as I should (if any) on addresses I've posted using the technique.


fang ~ 09 November 2005 at 12:08 AM

I don't really know its effectiveness. It probably works for most cases I guess?

Actually, if it works, then there really is no point in using ascii characters for the whole email. theoretically, using just ONE ascii character would be just as effective.

which is why i only use ascii characters for the @ sign and all dots [.] comments?


LintHuman ~ 09 November 2005 at 10:23 AM

I've always been under the impression that simply using ASCII characters was no barrier to spambots at all. That's based on hearsay, rather than experience or study, by the way. Dan's Enkoder has the advantage (as far as I understand it) of creating the obfuscating JavaScript on the fly, so no two e-mail addresses use the same method of encryption. Sure, it does require the user's browser to support JavaScript, but you can put your name AT domain DOT com in the NOSCRIPT tag - that's what it's for, right? ;)