On Email Address Obfuscation

Most of you who read this will think "Why is this guy saying this. Everybody knows this." Well, maybe not for those who are just getting started on the web (and yes, those exist).

It is common practice on the web to make your email address very hard to read. This isn’t an attempt to fool internet users; if the poster didn’t want his email known, he wouldn’t post it. It is an attempt to fool programs that scour the internet for email addresses for use by spammers. Yes, if you post your email online, you will eventually get spammed. Sorry.

So, people started obfuscating their addresses in such a way that they couldn’t be recognized by the programs that search for emails. Let’s take the email fakeemail@gmail.com for an example. Eventually, some spammer is going to spam fakeemail@gmail.com because their automatic email collecting program will find it. But, you can usually trick these programs by posting your email as "fakeemail a t gmail dot com." To a human, that can be deciphered. But that is less likely the case for a program (depending on how sophisticated it is).

An idea that I like that I’m about to use is to replace the very end, so that it becomes "fakeemail a t gmail etc," where the "etc" really means the ".com" that ends so many emails. My email that I am about to put on my blog is "eric dot sowell a t gmail etc." Can you figure that out? If so, you can send me email! And unless a spammer comes and sees it himself...he probably won’t :)

So, if you were wondering what all those funky email addresses where, now you know.