Markdown Discuss - Feb 2011 - Email Obfuscation Techniques

The other thread brought to my attention that only the <email> syntax
obfuscates mailto links. Plus, while the entity encoding technique
probably fools some scrapers, I doubt it's all that effective. Even
Gruber uses the Hivelogic Enkoder [1].

So, what are people using for obfuscation and are you using any
scripting or automation (filter that takes a pass before or after
Markdown) to get this into your HTML?

[1]: hivelogic.com/enkoder

-- 
arno? s? hautala? ? /-|?? arno at alum.wpi.edu

pgp b2c9d448

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Arno Hautala <arno at alum.wpi.edu>
wrote:
> The other thread brought to my attention that only the <email> syntax
> obfuscates mailto links. Plus, while the entity encoding technique
> probably fools some scrapers, I doubt it's all that effective.
Incredibly, it's still very effective.  Back when I kept a personal
site with actual content, I kept an entity-encoded mailto: link to
asswipe at quillio.com on all pages.  For maybe eight years (up until
about four years ago), that alias never received a message.  I still
use entity-encoding mailtos on public sites and don't have the
impression that they're scraped.

I think the harvesters are all about low-hanging fruit, and decoding
is still more expensive than it's worth.  Might change some day, but
doesn't seem to have -- yet.

LQ


-- 
Lou Quillio
http://quillio.com/
public at quillio.com
+1 518.285.0003 (gVoice)