Please stop using (at) email [dot] com

This guy openly states that he's using GMail, and assumes that because he doesn't get much spam that everyone else won't either.<p>I've worked with proprietary products like Barracudas, and similar open source systems like MailScanner, and none of them have been as good at stopping spam and allowing legitimate messages as GMail.<p>So extrapolating out his sample size of one to the entire internet is a bit of a stretch.<p>Further, he assumes that people running these scanners are doing regex type stuff to get these variations, when it's more likely that 99% of e-mail harvesters won't bother.<p>Spending the time to get those few amount of e-mails would not be worth the time, not to mention, the people that try to obscure their e-mail are probably the least likely people to buy viagra from some unsolicited e-mail.

I believe the purpose is just to make it harder (which, really, is the purpose of security in general).<p>Of course if a spammer wanted <i>my</i> email address there would be little I could do to stop them, but a script kiddie that just learned regex and does a preliminary `wget | grep` won't notice my slightly obfuscated address missing from the list of billions of low hanging fruit.<p>While I certainly see your rationale for not "break[ing] the internet," there are sometimes more important things than usability. If someone can't be bothered to retype my non-mailto-ified email address, chances are high I'm better off not being bothered by their email.

I've seen this before:<p>to email me, take off my pants... <i>mypants</i>actualemail@yahoo.com<p>Probably not very effective but funny. :)

Why not convert the email address to a readable (and mailto-able) format in javascript?

This is also an awesome little trick:<p>&#60;span class='reverse'&#62;moc.liamg@liame.my&#60;/span&#62;<p>.reverse { direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: bidi-override; }

Recaptcha's email solution isn't too elegant, but it works: <a href="http://www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide/</a><p>If you are on a forum, you can link to a page with the Recatcha solution too (e.g. hosted for free on Github). You could combine it with a contact form too, and give visitors an option between the two.

I'm a fan of [name] ... [email] (I.e. joe22 ... yahoo). Gets the point across in a safe way.

Well, I'm not sure if the author is correct. I'm sure that the spammers use automated scripts and there also a lot of script kiddies, which just use the script without knowing how it works. I changed to ..[at].. [dot].. email notation a while ago and I received much less spam.<p>I'd to compare it to ssh on port 22. If you run it on the default port you will notice a lot of failed logins etc. If you change the port to e.g. 8756 you don't get any failed logins anymore, because the script doesn't scan and just use the default port.