Talk:Email address use

I think it'd be safe to encourage people to change "foobar@freegeek.org" to "foobar at freegeek dot org" since no information is lost. A basic concept of a wiki is to enocuarage everyone to fix it where possible, not to create more work for the admins. RfS 19:12, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)

the risk of doing it that way

I agree, ease-of-use and utility are of very high importance. But how effective would that rule be? (See one study's analysis, heavily edited for relevance to our discussion, below.) I still think it's a bad idea for people to put more than the occasional email address in, even obscured like that. --Pete 19:38, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)
Following is from a Berkeley spam harvest study.

3. Obscure email addresses

"Obscuring" addresses — by rewriting them in various ways — doesn't offer nearly the degree of protection against harvesting tools as the more effective methods discussed above. The alternatives of using JavaScript...and offering...contact forms...are both far more effective... On the other hand, obscuring addresses is often much simpler, as this approach typically does not require any programming.

The following are four techniques that you can use to "obscure" email addresses on your web pages:

3.2. "Munge" email addresses

Address "munging" typically consists of substituting words for symbols in the domain name parts of email addresses — "at" (or variations thereof) for the "at sign" and "dot" or "period" for the periods, and the like — as well as adding whitespace between each part of the address. Sometimes extraneous text is also added to the address, which a human reader would ostensibly know to remove.

Using this technique, webmaster@yourhost.berkeley.edu could be munged as:

• webmaster -at- yourhost dot berkeley dot edu

or perhaps:

• webmaster -at- NOSPAM yourhost dot berkeley dot edu

Benefits. This technique is also likely to foil simple-minded harvesting tools.

Drawbacks. This technique places burdens on your site's visitors to understand how to "unmunge" your email addresses [...]

Finally, sophisticated harvesting programs with pattern matching capabilities may still be able to retrieve a fairly high percentage of the addresses trivially obscured in this manner.