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This question is in response to this question asked here before. I was thinking about simply converting the email into HTML Hex/Decimal unicode.

Example:

To show [email protected] I'd use the decimal unicode:

john.appleseed@mail.com

or the hex unicode:

john.appleseed@mail.com

This has many advantages over other methods which rely on CSS, Javascript, images etc. For example, it would be possible for the email to be displayed on almost all browsers including console ones like elinks or w3m. Secondly it would even work if the user has explicitly disabled JS or block images.

My question would this be a good method for email obsfucation when compared to the other popular ones?

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  • Your question might get better answers over at webmasters.stackexchange.com
    – Jacob Schoen
    Commented Jul 26, 2011 at 15:12
  • @Bernhard I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. Does obfuscation work for what? As a general rule, obfuscation doesn't work for stopping people from seeing the contents assuming they can see the obfuscated contents.
    – Darth Android
    Commented Jul 26, 2011 at 15:28

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This is but a fairly minor variant upon the Replacing '@' and '.' with Entities method already discussed in the hyperlinked question-and-answers. I actually use that latter method myself. I've not measured its effectiveness, but statistics from those who have are cited in the original answers to that question.

This variant wouldn't gain one much more over the original. So the answer is pretty much "No.".

The method in general is predicated upon the notion that the WWW page scrapers that are presumed to exist are lazy, and don't want to write full HTML parsers. They just search for @ (or at) and do some fairly simple pattern matching. If, on the other hand, they were to have a full HTML parser capable of recognizing decimal and hexadecimal numeric character references, then it really doesn't matter whether just @ and . are encoded or every character in the entire mailbox name is encoded. The page scrapers will decode everything quite happily.

It is, after all, more work, not less, to have a numeric character reference decoder that only decodes some characters. ☺

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