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14

This is true iff you believe that spam's cost is entirely in the mental effort of processing it. If you believe that some of spam's cost is in bandwidth, or in maintaining spam filters, then preventing spam reaching your inbox in the first place is a worthy goal. Both of these elements have an ongoing cost (a parallel to the 'improving your obsfuscation' element in the discussion), it's just that services like Google are willing to provide it for the price of being able to read all your private correspondence.
– ijw
Commented Jan 24, 2011 at 14:05
4

@ijw - The ongoing cost of a team of a few people at Google maintaining the spam filter system will always be less than making their hundreds of millions of customers do anything at all. Assuming that spam is kept to a reasonable amount, the bandwidth probably isn't much of an issue either.
– Kevin Vermeer
Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 21:08
14

The tldr version is longer.
– Synetech
Commented Feb 20, 2012 at 1:41
8

@Synetech: the poster probably meant that reading the linked article was the long version.
– Daniel Andersson
Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 14:04
If the obfuscation is complicated enough it will take spammers considerable resources to get the email address (because by Rice's theorem there is no way of predicting the output of a given program without running it). Let's say it takes 3 seconds on a decent computer to decrypt the email address. It would be fine for a humans. Not so for bots which are doing it on a huge scale. In short, it makes it very costly for bots to get the email addresses.
– Kaveh
Commented Jul 22, 2013 at 20:07

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