Timeline for Does e-mail address obfuscation actually work?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 21, 2011 at 7:40 | comment | added | Elazar Leibovich | OTOH, if a spammer see an obfuscated mail address, he can be sure that this is a really used email address, else why obfuscating it?. Note that the spammer doesn't care if spamming is effective, but he cares how many of the recipient actually get the spam. He sells spam services, not products. | |
| Jan 21, 2011 at 5:32 | comment | added | Sathyajith Bhat♦ | I don't obfuscate my email, fwiw I haven't seen any difference w/ & w/o obfuscation. Even if it does go through, Gmail does a pretty good job of catching spam, and even if it doesn't I just hit that Report Spam button. | |
| Jan 21, 2011 at 5:06 | comment | added | user1931 | Exactly. Not to mention the performance hit on a parser to use such a pattern when processing that much data. | |
| Jan 21, 2011 at 4:59 | comment | added | Kyle Cronin | True, and spammers probably realize that people that obfuscate their email address don't want and won't fall for spam anyway, but on the flip side there are some harvesters that get paid per address for whom it would be trivial to identify some of the basic obfuscation patterns (having "gmail" on the page is a start) | |
| Jan 21, 2011 at 4:52 | history | answered | Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams | CC BY-SA 2.5 |