Does e-mail obfuscation really make automatic harvesting harder?

Question

Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harversting harder conseal them via obfuscation - @ is replaced with \"at\" and . is replaced with

Answer 1

To provide a literal answer, yes, harvesting obfuscated addresses is harder than harvesting standardized addresses. The real question is whether the extra effort will be put in by harvesters and if the (major? minor?) barrier to the harvesters is worth the possible problems for your users.

If you are going to scramble addresses or otherwise transpose them away from the standard form, you should avoid being consistent in how you do so – at least on the same site.

For example, if every email address on a large community site is reversed in the markup and rendered properly with CSS, or token-replaced (@ becomes 'at'), or any other predictable method, the harvesters will just write a thin adapter for your site.

Think of it this way: if it only takes you one line of code to "scramble" them sitewide, it will only take the harvester one line of code to "unscramble" them for your site. Roughly speaking.

In my opinion, spam has become such a problem and so many DBs have been turned over that we're beyond hiding our addresses. Instead, consider looking at Defensio and Akismet, etc, to help classify and block spam.