Using AT Doesn’t Make Your Email Safer
You know how some people post their email like this email AT gmail.com or emailATgmaildotcom all over the web? Frankly my dear, I’m afraid that won’t help very much. It is just as easy to write a robot to find strings of text that match an email address as it is to program it to match and pick up strings of text with the ATgmaildotcom.
If you really must broadcast your email address, use an image. There are many email badge or image generators online. Or better yet, use reCaptcha MailHide.
photo credit: Mzelle Biscotte
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I just rev9iewed your 2007 article about recaptcha. Looks like it is a good service but for me I wouldn’t go with an external service (don’t want to depend on someone else).
For my main sites where I publish an email address, I have the email as a gif or jpg file. I also do this with personal information like name/address.
An other effective way is to use one of the so called email obfuscators which convert the text string into eihter hexadecimal code. The webbrowser interprets these ‘funny’ numbers correctly and show the text string. A scraper program will probably still find/extract your email, but those programs that read the html-code without interpreting it will not find it.